2258 TMCB
Office Hours: By Appointment
Phone: 801-422-0628
amy.williams@byu.edu
https://hapi-dna.org/
| Course | Title | Semester |
|---|---|---|
| C S 312 | Algorithm Design & Analysis | Fall 2025 |
Amy Williams' research interests span the intersection of computer science and genetics, with a key focus on detecting relatives and pedigrees in human genetic data. Relatives are widespread in large genetic studies but generally must be detected using statistical and computational tools. Developing methods that can scale to giant datasets and that combine information from multiple relatives enables precise inference of not only pairs of relatives but also more complete pedigree structures that connect many individuals. Analyzing DNA from families and relatives is helpful for both medical genetics and for family history and genealogy research. The HAPI-DNA website provides tools the lab developed that are useful for family history.
Amy L. Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. Previously, she worked as a Senior Scientist at 23andMe until November 2024, and was an Associate Professor of Computational Biology at Cornell University until December 2022. She received her PhD (2010) and SM (2005) degrees in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and BS (2003) degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Utah. From 2009-2013 she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, and from 2013-2014 she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Columbia University.
