Vagheesh M. Narasimhan, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, will deliver the talk titled: “Using ancient DNA to understand human population structure, natural selection and life history traits over the past 10,000 years.” Dr. Narasimhan is speaking as part of the Program for Mathematical Genomics Distinguished Seminar series. 

Abstract:

The powerful new genomic technology of ancient DNA (the ability to obtain genomic information ancient skeletal material) has transformed the field of human genetics by extending the availability of data from the single dimension of space to two dimensions - adding the important new dimension of time. Dr. Narasimhan will describe the application of methods to detect population mixture and its timing to thousands of ancient genomes to detail human population movement in Europe and South Asia over the past 10,000 years. He will discuss the implications of these results on large-scale cultural processes such as the profound transition from hunting and gathering to farming and the 250-year old problem of the spread of Indo-European languages. Time series data also provides the opportunity to observe genomic change over time directly in humans, and he will describe approaches and results for the inference of natural selection. Finally,  Dr. Narasimhan will discuss the development of a new predictor for estimating the chronological age of a sample based on training data from large numbers of modern cancer genomic datasets and applying this to ancient DNA samples towards the goal of inferring human life expectancy over the course of human history.