About Me

I’m Walid Mawass, an evolutionary geneticist and postdoctoral scholar with Jeremy Berg at the University of Chicago. I study how population history shapes genetic variation and trait architecture, and what that determines about outcomes: whether a population can adapt and persist, and whether a polygenic score works in the population it is applied to.

My work combines pedigree-based quantitative genetics, allele frequency theory, and forward-time simulation, applied to systems ranging from preindustrial human genealogies and monitored wild vertebrates to biobank-scale GWAS.

Research

• Adaptation and persistence. What limits evolutionary response in wild and historical populations, and what small populations lose when beneficial mutations run short.
• Population history and human genetic architecture. How demographic history and residual ancestry stratification shape what polygenic scores can and cannot predict.

More on my research →

Recent work

• Extinction vortices are driven more by a shortage of beneficial mutations than by deleterious mutation accumulation. Proc. R. Soc. B, 2026.
• Quantifying the susceptibility of polygenic scores to ancestry stratification. bioRxiv, 2025.
• Assessing the impact of pedigree attributes on the validity of quantitative genetic parameter estimates. J. Evol. Biol., 2025.

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