Charleston Chiang

Charleston Chiang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, USC. He is also the Associate Director of the Center for Genetic Epidemiology. His research focuses on understanding how evolutionary forces like demographic history and natural selection shape genetic architecture in human populations, with a focus on diverse groups such as Native Hawaiians, Latinos, Sardinians, and Finns.

Education: B.S. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from UCLA; Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University; Postdoctoral training in Population Genetics and Human Genetics at UCLA.

Research Interests: Population genetics, medical genetics, evolutionary demography, and genomic studies of complex traits. He leads large-scale genomic projects to characterize population structure, signals of natural selection, and genetic risk loci in understudied populations. His lab develops computational methods for demographic inference and ancestry-specific analyses.

Publications: Over 100 peer-reviewed articles, including high-impact studies in Nature Genetics, American Journal of Human Genetics, and Cell Genomics. Recent work includes polygenic score evaluation in Native Hawaiians, genealogy-based demographic frameworks, and leukemia risk loci in Latino populations.

• Awards: ASHG Excellence Awards, NIH/NHGRI grants, and the Keck School of Medicine Mentoring Award.
• Lab Team: Mentors 10+ trainees, including PhD students and postdocs working on genomic methods, population history, and disease genetics.

Lab Activities: Focus on integrating evolutionary insights with medical genetics. Collaborations with global consortia like the Multiethnic Cohort and the Hispanic/Latino Anthropometry Consortium.