Patterns of genetic variation in modern-day human populations have been shaped by our evolutionary past, environmental resources, and cultural practices. Diet has been a particularly strong force in influencing human evolution. Major events such as plant and animal domestication and the development of agriculture dramatically changed the food sources that human populations rely on and have had demonstrable effects on our evolution.

One aspect of my research focuses on how food availability impacts human adaptations in genes related to diet and metabolism. I research the FADS gene cluster, genes involved in the metabolism of polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as omega fatty acids. Signals of positive selection have been observed in other worldwide populations, indicating that these genes have experienced multiple independent recurrent selection events related to the differences in availability of dietary fats in foods like plants versus meat and fish. 

I examine the evolutionary history of these genes in Near Oceania and whether there are signals of selection as have been observed in geographically proximal locations like populations in Indonesia and southeast China. 

Starting over 50,000 years ago, humans began to disperse from our common origin in Africa around the globe. Population genetic methods can help unravel the demographic and population histories of different populations and also investigate how these processes, in conjunction with evolutionary processes such as natural selection and cultural processes like marriage patterns, affect patterns of genetic diversity. 

Runs of homozgosity (ROH) are regions of our genome that are identical because of shared parental ancestry. While all humans have ROH due to our shared evolutionary past, the amount of ROH between individuals can vary greatly. The amount and length of ROH can help inform us about a population's evolutionary past. For example, populations that are small and have been small for a long period of time are likely to have many and long ROH.

For this project, I analyzed ROH and compared the amounts of ROH found in Near Oceania to other global populations. The patterns of ROH help reveal the history of dispersal and bottlenecks in Near Oceania as well as fine-scale differences between Near Oceanic populations. I also characterized their distribution across their genome to identify where in the genome ROHs are common and the functional consequences of the genes and genetic variants found in these regions.