Dr. Serena Tucci

Biography

Serena Tucci is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University and Principal Investigator of the Human Evolutionary Genomics Laboratory. Her research addresses fundamental questions in human evolution and population history by using DNA from both present-day and ancient humans. She employs an interdisciplinary approach that integrates expertise from anthropology, population genetics, and computational biology to reconstruct past demographic events and disentangle the genetic basis of human adaptation. Through fieldwork, laboratory work, and cutting-edge computational methods, her work aims to illuminate the mechanisms of evolutionary change and the genetic legacy left by extinct human populations, including Neandertals and the enigmatic Denisovans, in modern human genomes across Island Southeast Asia and Oceania. Prior to joining Yale, she conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington and at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Serena's work has been supported by grants from the Lewis Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research from the American Philosophical Society.

Research Interests