Sohini Ramachandran | |
---|---|
Education | Stanford University |
Alma mater | Stanford University |
Scientific career | |
Thesis | The signature of historical migrations on human population genetic data (2007) |
Doctoral advisor | Marcus Feldman |
Website | https://brown.edu/Research/Ramachandran_Lab/ |
Sohini Ramachandran is professor at Brown University known for her work in evolutionary biology and population genetics.
Ramachandran's parents were both professors. [1] In the summer before her senior year of high school, Ramachandran completed a research project in plant genomics under the guidance of Marcus Feldman, which won her the fourth place prize in the 1998 Westinghouse Science Talent Search, [2] where when she was the youngest finalist in the group. [3] Ramachandran earned a B.S. from Stanford University in 2002. She went on to complete a Ph.D. at Stanford University in the Department of Biological Sciences, advised by Marcus Feldman. Her dissertation research was dissertation was titled "The signature of historical migrations on human population genetic data." [4] Following her PhD, she was in the Harvard Society of Fellows as a postdoctoral researcher with John Wakeley in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. [5] She moved to Brown University in 2010 and was promoted to professor in 2021. [5] In 2019, she was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. [6]
Ramachandran's research group uses statistical and mathematical modeling techniques to study evolutionary biology and population genetics. Her early research examined the genetic relationships originating within people from Africa, [7] [8] where she showed that diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases. [9] She has also investigated the use of genetic tools to track infectious diseases [10] [11] and shown that while more outbreaks are occurring, fewer people are getting infected. [12] She has also shown a lack of genetic evidence for selection for language at the FOXP2 site. [13]
In 2012, Ramachandran received a Sloan Research Fellowship [14] and was named a Pew Scholar. [15] From Brown University she has received the Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship (2016) [16] and the Philip J. Bray Award for excellence in teaching. [17] In 2019, she received a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering. [18] [19]
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was an Italian geneticist. He was a population geneticist who taught at the University of Parma, the University of Pavia and then at Stanford University.
In population genetics, the founder effect is the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population. It was first fully outlined by Ernst Mayr in 1942, using existing theoretical work by those such as Sewall Wright. As a result of the loss of genetic variation, the new population may be distinctively different, both genotypically and phenotypically, from the parent population from which it is derived. In extreme cases, the founder effect is thought to lead to the speciation and subsequent evolution of new species.
The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) was started by Stanford University's Morrison Institute in 1990s along with collaboration of scientists around the world. It is the result of many years of work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, one of the most cited scientists in the world, who has published extensively in the use of genetics to understand human migration and evolution. The HGDP data sets have often been cited in papers on such topics as population genetics, anthropology, and heritable disease research.
Researchers have investigated the relationship between race and genetics as part of efforts to understand how biology may or may not contribute to human racial categorization. Today, the consensus among scientists is that race is a social construct, and that using it as a proxy for genetic differences among populations is misleading.
Genetic distance is a measure of the genetic divergence between species or between populations within a species, whether the distance measures time from common ancestor or degree of differentiation. Populations with many similar alleles have small genetic distances. This indicates that they are closely related and have a recent common ancestor.
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.
Noah Aubrey Rosenberg is a geneticist working in evolutionary biology, mathematical phylogenetics, and population genetics, and is the Stanford Professor of Population Genetics and Society. His research focuses on mathematical modeling and statistical methods for genetics and evolution and he is the editor-in-chief of Theoretical Population Biology.
Human genetic variation is the genetic differences in and among populations. There may be multiple variants of any given gene in the human population (alleles), a situation called polymorphism.
The genetic history of Europe includes information around the formation, ethnogenesis, and other DNA-specific information about populations indigenous, or living in Europe.
Population structure is the presence of a systematic difference in allele frequencies between subpopulations. In a randomly mating population, allele frequencies are expected to be roughly similar between groups. However, mating tends to be non-random to some degree, causing structure to arise. For example, a barrier like a river can separate two groups of the same species and make it difficult for potential mates to cross; if a mutation occurs, over many generations it can spread and become common in one subpopulation while being completely absent in the other.
Haplogroup E-P2, also known as E1b1, is a human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup. E-P2 has two basal branches, E-V38 and E-M215. E-P2 had an ancient presence in East Africa and the Levant; presently, it is primarily distributed in Africa where it may have originated, and occurs at lower frequencies in the Middle East and Europe.
Aravinda Chakravarti is a human geneticist and expert in computational biology, and Director of the Center For Human Genetics & Genomics at New York University. He was the 2008 President of the American Society of Human Genetics. Chakravarti became a co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genome Research in 1995, and of the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics' in 2005.
In human population genetics, Y-Chromosome haplogroups define the major lineages of direct paternal (male) lines back to a shared common ancestor in Africa. Men in the same haplogroup share a set of differences, or markers, on their Y-Chromosome, which distinguish them from men in other haplogroups. These UEPs, or markers used to define haplogroups, are SNP mutations. Y-Chromosome Haplogroups all form "family trees" or "phylogenies", with both branches or sub-clades diverging from a common haplogroup ancestor, and also with all haplogroups themselves linked into one family tree which traces back ultimately to the most recent shared male line ancestor of all men alive today, called in popular science Y Chromosome Adam.
Marcus William Feldman is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) at Stanford University. He is an Australian-born mathematician turned American theoretical biologist, best known for his mathematical evolutionary theory and computational studies in evolutionary biology, and for originating with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza the theory of cultural evolution.
David Benjamin Goldstein is an American human geneticist. Goldstein is founding Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, Professor of Genetics and Development and directs the genomics core of Epi4K and administrative cores of Epi4K with Dan Lowenstein and Sam Berkovic.
Haplogroup E-M2, also known as E1b1a1-M2, is a human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup. E-M2 is primarily distributed within Africa followed by West Asia. More specifically, E-M2 is the predominant subclade in West Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, and the region of the African Great Lakes; it also occurs at moderate frequencies in North Africa, and the Middle East. E-M2 has several subclades, but many of these subhaplogroups are included in either E-L485 or E-U175. E-M2 is especially common among indigenous Africans who speak Niger-Congo languages, and was spread to Southern Africa and East Africa through the Bantu expansion.
Sharon Ruth Browning is a statistical geneticist at the University of Washington, and a research professor with its Department of Biostatistics. Her research has various implications for the field of biogenetics.
The ASUDAS is a reference system for collecting data on human tooth morphology and variation created by Christy G. Turner II, Christian R. Nichol, and G. Richard Scott. The ASUDAS gives detailed descriptions for common crown and root shape variants and their different degrees of expression. It also comprises a set of reference plaques illustrating dental variants as well as showing their expression levels in 3D. The ASUDAS was designed to ensure a standardized scoring procedure with minimum error in order to warrant comparability between data collected by different observers.
Human genetic clustering refers to patterns of relative genetic similarity among human individuals and populations, as well as the wide range of scientific and statistical methods used to study this aspect of human genetic variation.
Wylie Burke is a Professor Emerita and former Chair of the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington and a founding co-director of the Northwest-Alaska Pharmacogenomics Research Network, which partners with underserved populations in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.