Person:

Nicolaisen, Lauren Elisabeth

As deleterious variants continually arise in a population, they tend to be purged via purifying selection, leading to distortions in the shapes of genealogies relative to neutral expectations. In recent years, a mounting body of evidence has arisen suggesting that this can have significant implications for the patterns of diversity seen in natural populations. However, existing theory has not yet fully characterized the effects of these distortions on the structure of genealogies. The focus of this thesis is on exploring this gap, and developing an analytical description of the distortions that arise in genealogies due to purifying selection.