Gil McVean is the Acting Director of the newly-formed Big Data Institute, and co-chair of the 1000 Genomes analysis group. His research combines the development of statistical methods for large-scale sequence data with theoretical and empirical analyses of biological problems. One of his particular interests is to dissect signals of disease association with genomic regions that are highly polymorphic due to continual evolutionary interplay between hosts and pathogens, such as the human HLA region and Plasmodium falciparum var genes.