New postdocs joining the Human Diversity team – Meet Miguel Baltazar-Soares

Miguel: I am an evolutionary biologist specialized in population genetics and genomics, with a deep interest in the application of molecular tools to understand complex evolutionary scenarios.  My research has been mainly focused on the identification of genomic signatures of connectivity, demography, natural selection (via local adaptation), and genotype-phenotype or genotype-environment associations.
As a population geneticist I have worked with a wide range of organisms but never with humans. So now is the time to explore what is perhaps one of the wealthiest databases in terms of genomic resources. My expected contribution to the Human Diversity research group is to explore the hypothesis of self-domestication from a genomic point of view. For that, I will build a database of genes involved in aggressive behavior in humans presently, mine publicly available archeogenomes (from Neandertals and Denisovans to an epoch as recent as approx. 10000 years ago) for those same genetic regions, and reconstruct of the temporal dynamics of any sort of observed genetic variation.

Welcome to the Human Diversity team, Miguel!