Dr Aida Andres

Aida is interested in how organisms adapt to their environment. In her work, this means analysing genomes, both modern and ancient, to infer how natural selection mediates genetic adaptations. Most of her work has been on humans, as they have an interesting history of fast colonization of diverse environments, and in endangered primates, where the ability to adapt to quickly changing environments is crucial for survival. Her group tackles these questions analysing genomes, both modern and ancient. They use genomic approaches to study the processes of adaptation, population genetic techniques to make inferences on the history of selected alleles, and functional information to infer the consequences in present-day phenotypes of previously adaptive alleles. The group is particularly interested in the types of natural selection that maintain diversity within populations (e.g. balancing selection) or that create differences among populations (e.g. local adaptation), as well as adaptive introgression.