Charleston Chiang, PhD

Biography

Charleston Chiang is Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at USC. He is a medical population geneticist focused on understanding how the evolutionary forces, specifically demographic history and natural selection, shaped the genetic architecture of complex traits within and between human populations. To this end, he has led a number of large-scale genomic studies in humans to characterize the fine-scale population structure, to investigate signals of natural selection and adaptation, and to leverage these evolutionary insights to map the genetic loci underlying human complex traits. He is most interested in studying diverse populations with a unique history; he has worked with populations from Finland, China, Sardinia, as well as with cohorts of Latino Americans and Native Hawaiians. Prior to his position at Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Dr. Chiang received his B.S. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University, and completed his postdoctoral training in Population Genetics and Human Genetics at UCLA. His current lab website can be found at http://chianglab.usc.edu