Maanasa Raghavan
University of Chicago, IL·Genetics
Nearly a quarter of the world's people are South Asian, yet very little genetic data, ancient or modern, comes from this region. That gap leaves a patchy picture of where South Asian populations came from, how their diseases evolved, and why disease risk differs among groups.
- Fields
Genetics
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
ancient DNA
aDNA
population genomics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Reconstruct the last ~8,000 years of South Asian population history, including migrations and admixture (the mixing of separate populations), by jointly generating and analyzing ancient and modern human genome datasets.
- Detect ancient pathogens (disease-causing microbes) in human skeletal remains from South Asia and use phylogenetic analysis, which builds evolutionary family trees, to trace how infectious diseases evolved in the region.
- Test how the shift from traditional to 'westernized' diets and subsistence changes the gut microbiome, the microbes living in the intestine, and health, working with Indigenous populations across India.
More about the research
This research program combines DNA from ancient skeletons with DNA from people living today. Present-day gene pools and disease patterns are products of long evolutionary processes, and the program aims to trace them across the region.
Why it matters
South Asia carries a large share of the world's infectious and non-infectious disease, but its populations are underrepresented in genetic research. The genetic histories and gut microbiome data from this work could help explain why disease susceptibility differs among South Asian groups. They could also inform precision medicine, treatment matched to a person's genetic background, for people in the region and its large diaspora.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David E Reich
Harvard University, MA·Genetics
Assemble an ancient DNA time series of 34,000 West Eurasians, enough to measure natural selection coefficients as small as about 0.25%, and release it as a public resource before publication.
Xinjun Zhang
University of Michigan, MI·Genetics
Develop machine learning methods to detect archaic introgression from unknown 'ghost' archaic humans in East Asian genomes.
Claire Ebert
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Social Science
Reconstruct diet and mobility in an early complex society through isotopic analysis of chemical signatures in human skeletal remains.
The school
University of Chicago: 39 labs on PI Pages, $681M a year on research, 457 research doctorates a year.
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