The Keller Lab

Matt McQueen, me, Dan Howrigan, Christine Garver-Apgar, Matt Simonson

Contact information:
Matt Keller phn#: 303-735-5376
Lab phn#: 303-492-7582 (East wing) & 303-735-6179 (West wing)

Also visit our internal wikisite, where lab meetings, program code, links, and interesting papers are posted.

Welcome! Our lab is interested in finding motivated, quantitatively-minded graduate students or postdocs to work with. As much of our work has become programming intensive, we are also interested in finding students or researchers with computer programming experience. That said, most people who work in our lab started with NO programming experience and basic statistical knowledge; they just had a burning desire to answer interesting questions and learned the programming and statistics along the way. So if those qualities apply to you and you’re shopping for a lab to work in, read on...

Keller’s Interests
I am an assistant professor in Psychology and Neuroscience. One of my principal interests involves testing evolutionary hypotheses about the causes of genetic differences between people. For example, what evolutionary processes led to heritable differences in risk to mental retardation, schizophrenia, or autism? Were the genes that increase homosexuality, heart disease, or extraversion selected for or against in ancestral environments? An estimated 4% of people have a severe mental disorder - what accounts for such high prevalence rates of heritable disorders in modern environments? The exciting thing about these sorts of questions is that they are not just fodder for cocktail parties - available genetic data can help us sort between several well-understood and time-tested evolutionary models. There is a lot of room for students to help shape this nascent field. Here’s a representative publication that sets the groundwork for some of this work.

What type of work might graduate students / postdocs do here?
Graduate students interested mostly in working with me should apply to the Behavioral Genetics (BG) area in Psychology and Neuroscience. Should you be accepted here, you will probably spend a lot of your research time at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics - a world-class research institute affiliated with both Psychology and IPHY (among others). The advantage of this is that you can work with different people on different projects - you aren’t pigeonholed into one particular lab.

Obviously we would be most interested in working with students who share some of our interests above. For both of us, it would be great to find students who are eager to learn statistical packages (Mx, PLINK, etc.) & languages (R, C++, etc.) used in analysis of genetic data. With that said, we should take a step back. We are really just interested in working with talented students on a broad range of projects, from topics in evolutionary psychology and psychiatry to those in behavioral and statistical genetics. The most important issue is: Does our research have a clear question and will our approach further our understanding of that question?

Why should you apply to work here?

• CU Psychology is consistently ranked within the top 25 of psychology programs. As a consequence, it is highly selective (accepting under 10% of applicants), attracting some of the best and brightest students in psychology.
• Institute for Behavioral Genetics is a world-class institute. By working here, you will have access to large, genetically informative datasets (for example, longitudinal datasets of adopted children or twins). Access to such datasets can make a huge difference in your publication record as a graduate student!
• IBG students also have the option of developing skills in sophisticated molecular genetics laboratories and of learning techniques for analyzing such data.
• Most graduate students in psychology at CU receive full financial support.
• Boulder is a fantastic town, not too big and not too small, and often shows up on one of those “best places to live” lists. It has great public transport and a terrific bike-trail system (no problem getting around for those without vehicles). It is also one of the sunniest places in the U.S. (see one of my publications about the effects of weather on mood and cognition).
• Lots to do: skiing, snowmobiling, and snowshoeing in winter; hiking, biking, camping, and rafting in summer/fall.
• The Boulder campus is within walking distance of beautiful Rocky Mountain hiking and biking trails
• And last but not least... you can help us develop the nascent field of evolutionary behavioral genetics and learn about the genetic underpinnings of psychiatric disorders..