● Research interests
I investigate how migration, admixture, and historical forces shape human variation across time and place, using pigmentation as a model. By reading historical and modern genomes alongside written and archival records, I explore the intersections of evolutionary history, human diversity, and the social construction of race.
I am a genetic historian. I read DNA as a historical document.
As a genetic historian, I use DNA to study human history, with a particular interest in what happens when populations that were once separated come together. Human populations have always migrated and admixed, but as globalization accelerates these processes, understanding how admixture reshapes human variation has become increasingly important. My research seeks to understand not only how populations come together, but also how the biological legacies of those encounters unfold over time.
I approach these questions through the study of skin pigmentation, a trait that offers a particularly powerful window into human variation. Pigmentation is among the most variable and evolutionarily dynamic traits in our species. Its genetic architecture is relatively well characterized, it has been shaped by natural selection across diverse environments, and it remains responsive to environmental conditions within an individual’s lifetime. This combination makes pigmentation an ideal model for studying human variation across multiple scales: from differences between populations to variation within them, and from evolutionary histories spanning thousands of years to biological responses unfolding within a single lifetime. By following pigmentation across populations with different histories of admixture, I can investigate how human variation is reshaped as previously separated populations come together.
Understanding these changes, however, requires more than genetics alone. What makes my approach as much historical as it is genetic is my treatment of DNA as a historical document, one that must be read alongside the written record. Throughout history, societies have constructed and enforced very different ideas about ancestry and racial belonging, with profound consequences for how populations interacted and formed families. In the United States, for example, the one-drop rule classified anyone with any known African ancestry as Black, while caste systems in parts of the Caribbean and South America distinguished individuals according to their degree of African ancestry. These systems did more than define social categories: they shaped patterns of marriage, reproduction, and gene flow, potentially setting populations on very different trajectories of human variation. By bringing historical and contemporary genomes into conversation with laws, legal codes, and archival records, I aim to understand how these social systems became embedded in the biological histories of populations.
Reading genomes as archives of human history also requires developing better tools for interpreting what they contain. Many methods for reconstructing population history were designed around groups that have been separated for long periods, making them less reliable when applied to highly admixed populations or those that have diverged only recently. An important component of my research therefore involves developing and refining computational approaches that can better capture how genetic variation changes through time, particularly in populations with complex histories of admixture. I also incorporate epigenomic data to investigate another dimension of these histories: biological plasticity, or how individuals respond to the environments in which they live. Together, these approaches allow me to examine not only the genetic legacies of past population encounters, but also how human biology continues to respond to changing social and environmental conditions.
Ultimately, my goal is to build an integrative research program that brings genetics, history, and the environment together to understand how human variation is shaped, transformed, and transmitted across generations. I view genomes not simply as records of biological ancestry, but as archives of human movement, social structures, and environmental experience. By reading these archives alongside the historical record and the environments in which people live, I hope to tell a fuller story of where human variation comes from, how it continues to change, and where it may be headed.
Using an integrated historical and genetic approach to understand human biological variation and the social and political systems built around its interpretation.
Skin pigmentation is a dynamic, complex trait that I have studied for years. Its remarkable variation makes it a powerful model for understanding human genetic diversity and tracing how evolutionary processes shape variation in actively admixing populations. Yet pigmentation is more than a biological trait; it is also a visible characteristic through which societies have historically constructed racial categories and assigned social meaning.
Population history is complex, and the ways we model it influence the evolutionary patterns we can recover. I investigate how migration, admixture, and population structure shape genetic variation, and how population history and a gene’s position within the melanogenesis network jointly influence evolutionary constraint and adaptation.
DNA is a historical document, but it tells us the most when read alongside the written record. I bring genomic data together with historical archives, legal codes, and documentary evidence to investigate how migration, admixture, and historical systems of racial classification have shaped our understanding of human variation—and how historical events have redirected population histories.
Honors thesis across both majors, bringing epigenetics into conversation with historical archives of chattel slavery. Biology and documents, side by side for the first time.
How environments register in the epigenome: stress, preterm birth and DNA methylation in an African American cohort.
Population genomics and epigenomics of high-altitude Andean populations, including the first whole-methylome dataset from Indigenous Andean and Amazonian populations, with training in ancient DNA.
Human variation through the lens of pigmentation: genetic constraint in the melanogenesis network, measurement bias across skin tones, and the infrastructure of forensic genomics.
Yemko Pryor, PhD