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Fernando Villanea (Biological Anthropology)

"I study the Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry that lives in our genomes, the consequence of our ancestors admixing with these two archaic populations over 40,000 years ago. That archaic ancestry is a window to the past: I use it to learn about Neanderthals and Denisovans life histories and evolution. That same archaic ancestry has functional and medical consequences that may affect our daily lives. I am particularly interested in how the archaic ancestry of the founding Indigenous populations of America helped them adapt to new environments, and how those genome variants affect the lives of their descendant populations. ÌýI do this through a combination of population genetics theory, computational biology, and observations of natural history, some of it based on the fossil record."