Undergraduate Spotlight Spring 2025

Mia Chaw (BA Anthropology in Progress) 

Mia Chaw is a senior majoring in Anthropology and MCDB. She does ancient DNA and bioinformatics work in Dr. Fernando Villanea's lab. She is focused on the role of archaic introgressed (mostly Neanderthal or Denisovan) DNA in a dataset of ancient genomes from the Americas. She studies these ancient individuals because Indigenous American and Latino populations are underrepresented in genomics research and because Indigenous Americans alive today often have European or African DNA resultant from European colonialism. She is looking for introgressed haplotypes, alleles, and functional candidate regions to learn how Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA may have assisted the peopling of the Americas.