Eran Elhaik (born 1980) is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned by Enkigen Genetics Limited, registered in Ireland.
[1] His research uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics.
In 2011, after concerns emerged about the retention of private genetic data of individuals in surveyed populations, the Genographic Project hired Elhaik and asked him to design a method that would enable analysts to extract only historical information from the accumulating genomic evidence of populations in order to ensure that the personal health data of sampled individuals remained private.
[17] Elhaik acknowledges the presence of a Middle Eastern signature amongst Ashkenazi Jews, but he isn't certain if this suggests ancient Judean or Iranian Ancestry.
[20] Elhaik has said that while his paper "has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and 'anti-Semitic white supremacists'", his intention was not to disprove a connection to biblical Jews, but rather "to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe".
Re-analyzing 12 PCA applications he found that the method lends itself to generating desired outcomes, and is characterized by cherrypicking and circular reasoning.
[31][32][33][34][35] Marcus Feldman has said that Elhaik is "just wrong" about the Khazar hypothesis, where he "appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data".