Eran Elhaik

Eran Elhaik (Hebrew: ערן אלחייק; born 1980) is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Hub owned by Anath Genomic Consultans AB, registered in Sweden. His research uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics.

After completing undergraduate studies in Israel, he obtained a PhD in molecular evolution under the supervision of Dan Graur at the University of Houston in 2009, followed by postdoctoral research fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and School of Public Health. In 2011, after concerns emerged about the retention of private genetic data of individuals in surveyed populations, the Genographic Project hired Elhaik and asked him to design a method that would enable analysts to extract only historical information from the accumulating genomic evidence of populations in order to ensure that the personal health data of sampled individuals remained private. From 2014 to 2019 he worked at the University of Sheffield Department of Animal and Plant Sciences in the United Kingdom. Since 2019 he has been an associate professor of bioinformatics at the Department of Biology at Lund University in Sweden.

In the field of molecular evolution, Elhaik worked on the compositional domain model that describes the compositional organization of animal genomes.

In the field of complex disorders, he proposed that the allostatic load theory could be used to explain bipolar disorder and Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). According to this theory, the accumulation of perinatal and prenatal stressors has neurotoxic effects with consequences to one's health.

In the field of genetics, Elhaik was part of the team that designed the GenoChip microarray for the Genographic Project and their online tests. He also contributed to the development of algorithms for data compression. in earlier ancestry studies, modern paternal or maternal haplogroups were used to trace migrations in antiquity. Elhaik was diffident about the method, considereding it problematic 'since the modern frequencies of haplogroups do not represent the past very accurately.' To this end he developed his aGPS algorithm to establish place of origin with greater precision.

In the field of population genetics, Elhaik has published papers analyzing the ancestries of European Jews and Druze, including work related to the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, a contentious subject that has received media attention.

Elhaik acknowledges the presence of a Middle Eastern signature amongst Ashkenazi Jews, but he isn't certain if this suggests ancient Judean or Iranian ancestry. He has previously proposed that Ashkenazi Jews are of mixed Irano-Turko-Slavic and southern European descent. Most of Elhaik's population genetic research uses the GPS (Geographic Population Structure) algorithm designed by him and co-authors.

Elhaik himself initially contacted Harry Ostrer, who, along with most other scientists in the field, proposes that the Jews are genetically related and relatively homogeneous, to obtain permission to access the data basis used by Ostrer and his colleagues to establish their result. Ostrer was willing to share his data provided that Elhaik submit a proposal showing that the project met several criteria, including that it be "non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people", which Elhaik claimed was evidence of bias.