Bio-bibliography

USA/Denmark and UK

Rasmus Nielsen and Ziheng Yang

2026 Balzan Prize for Molecular Evolution: Decoding Patterns of Genomic Change

For their pioneering and complementary contributions to molecular evolution, combining statistical theory, computational methods, and genomic analysis to reveal how natural selection shapes genes and populations, and for developing widely used tools that have transformed the study of evolutionary adaptation.<br />

Rasmus Nielsen (born on 27 January 1970) is a Danish biologist, Professor of Computational Biology in the Department of Integrative Biology and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of Biology at the University of Copenhagen.

He received a master’s degree in biology from the University of Copenhagen in 1994 and a PhD in population genetics from UC Berkeley in 1998. After being a postdoc at Harvard University, he held faculty positions at Cornell University, University of Copenhagen and UC Berkeley. He is currently Marthella Foskett Brown Chair in Biological Sciences, Professor in the departments of Integrative Biology and Statistics at UC Berkeley and a member of the Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics. At Berkeley, he has been teaching courses in population genetics, human genetics, statistical genomics, bioinfor-matics, and evolution.

Nielsen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences.

Ziheng Yang (born on 1 November 1964) is a Chinese-British geneticist, currently R.A. Fisher Professor of Statistical Genetics at University College London.

Born in China, Yang received his BSc in Gansu Agricultural University in 1984 and PhD in agronomy in Beijing Agricultural University (now China Agricultural University) in 1992. After a few postdoctoral positions in the UK and USA, he joined the faculty in the Department of Biology, University College London (UCL) in 1997. Since 2010 he has been R.A. Fisher Chair of Statistical Genetics. He is the Director of the UCL Centre for Computational Biology, and President of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.

Among their most important joint publications:

Likelihood Models for Detecting Positively Selected Amino Acid Sites and Applications to the HIV-1 Envelope Gene by Rasmus Nielsen & Ziheng Yang

– Genetics 148: 929-936, 1998.

Synonymous and Nonsynonymous Rate Variation in Nuclear Genes of Mammals by Ziheng Yang & Rasmus Nielsen – Journal of Molecular Evolution 46: 409-418, 1998.

Models of Amino Acid Substitution and Applications to Mitochondrial Protein Evolution by Ziheng Yang, Rasmus Nielsen & Masami Hasegawa – Molecular Biology and Evolution 15: 1600-1611, 1998.

Codon-Substitution Models for Detecting Molecular Adaptation at Individual Sites Along Specific Lineages by Ziheng Yang & Rasmus Nielsen – Molecular Biology and Evolution 19: 908-917, 2002.

Estimating the Distribution of Selection Coefficients from Phylogenetic Data with Applications to Mitochondrial and Viral DNA by Rasmus Nielsen & Ziheng Yang – Molecular Biology and Evolution 20: 1231-1239, 2003.

Effect of Recombination on the Accuracy of the Likelihood Method for Detecting Positive Selection at Amino Acid Sites by Maria Anisimova, Rasmus Nielsen & Ziheng Yang – Genetics 164: 1229-1236, 2003.

Accuracy and Power of Statistical Methods for Detecting Adaptive Evolution in Protein Coding Sequences and for Identifying Positively Selected Sites by Wendy S. W. Wong, Ziheng Yang, Nick Goldman & Rasmus Nielsen – Genetics 168: 1041-1051, 2004.

Bayes Empirical Bayes Inference of Amino Acid Sites under Positive Selection by Ziheng Yang, Wendy S. W. Wong & Rasmus Nielsen – Molecular Biology and Evolution 22: 1107-1118, 2005.

Evaluation of an Improved Branch-Site Likelihood Method for Detecting Positive Selection at the Molecular Level by Jianzhi Zhang, Rasmus Nielsen & Ziheng Yang – Molecular Biology and Evolution 22: 2472-2479, 2005.

Mutation-Selection Models of Codon Substitution and Their Use to Estimate Selective Strengths on Codon Usage by Ziheng Yang & Rasmus Nielsen – Molecular Biology and Evolution 25: 568-579, 2008.