Magnus Nordborg studied biology and mathematics at the Lund University in Sweden before doing his PhD in Biology at Stanford. He went on to a postdoc in the Charlesworth lab at the University of Chicago and then obtained an assistant professor position at Lund University. He then moved to the University of Southern California as an assistant professor before being promoted first to associate and then research associate professor. In 2009 he was recruited to become the director of the Gregor Mendel Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was a critical contributor to the development of genome-wide association studies outside humans, and his research continues to focus on evolution and population genetics. The proposed project is central to his research interests and he will dedicate a substantial fraction of his research time to the SFB.