15 Facts About Eran Elhaik

Eran Elhaik's research uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics.

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.

Eran Elhaik contributed to the development of algorithms for data compression.

Eran Elhaik was diffident about the method, considereding it problematic 'since the modern frequencies of haplogroups do not represent the past very accurately.

Eran 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.

Eran Elhaik has previously proposed that Ashkenazi Jews are of mixed Irano-Turko-Slavic and southern European descent.

Ostrer was willing to share his data provided that Eran Elhaik submit a proposal showing that the project met several criteria, including that it be "non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people", which Eran Elhaik claimed was evidence of bias.

Eran Elhaik has said that while his paper "has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and 'anti-Semitic white supremacists'", his intention was not to disprove a connection to biblical Jews, but rather "to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe".

Eran Elhaik's applications include GPS that allows geolocations of human DNA and mGPS, an AI-based tool which employs the water, soil, and urban environment microbiome for geolocation and can be used forensically to complement or replace DNA and fingerprint evidence.

Eran Elhaik has published a legal opinion on how privacy laws should be amended to accommodate advancements in metagenomics.

In terms of pure theory, Eran Elhaik has published a critique of the methodology of PCA that undergirds the whole structure of population genetics.

Eran Elhaik illustrated the point by instancing the case of genetic studies of the origins of Ashkenazi Jews.

Marcus Feldman has said that Eran Elhaik is "just wrong" about the Khazar hypothesis, where he "appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data".

Eran Elhaik argues that ancestry of Jewish populations is poorly understood, and that principal component analysis, employed to identify population structures and their ancestry, has serious flaws that generate erroneous results.

Falk then noted the follow-up paper by Behar challenging Eran Elhaik's results argued that the southern Caucasus populations, sampled by Eran Elhaik were related to countries further south.