Shamil Sunyaev is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and an Institute Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Shamil is a computational geneticist interested in many aspects of genetic variation from the evolutionary, functional and medical genetics perspectives. He obtained a PhD in molecular biophysics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and completed his postdoctoral training in bioinformatics at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He works in the fields of mutagenesis, population and statistical genetics, and the functional effect of allelic variants. Shamil will speak about statistics and biology of human germline mutation and about applications of statistical models of human mutation rate.