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Dr Lehti Saag
27 July 2021
Dr Lehti Saag has recently started as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Molecular and Cultural Evolution Lab at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment. Her research will look into adaptation and demographic processes in Ukraine.
Migration, admixture and natural selection have played a central role in shaping human genetic diversity. As part of the Eurasian Steppe, southern Ukraine experienced multiple migrations across the millennia, from the Yamnaya pastoralists to Slavic Cossacks. The EU-funded UkrAD project aims to study how the fusion of Steppe and early farmer ancestry was formed and how other migration processes influenced genetic variation in Ukraine from newly generated genomic data from 150 individuals. The project will also identify significant signals of selection and investigate hypotheses regarding which ecological factors drove selection on these alleles.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101029303.
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101029303