» An interview with our newest assistant professor, Kelsey Witt-Dillion, Ph.D.
What interested you in coming to Clemson University?
I’m really excited about all of the great genetics research coming out of Clemson across the departments, including Genetics and Biochemistry, Biological Sciences and the Center for Human Genetics. I’m happy to be joining a department with lots of new faculty doing some really exciting work. I’ve also heard great things about Clemson undergraduates, and I’m looking forward to start working with them.
How did you get interested in your (degree, career, research)?
I was interested in genetics even in high school, so I pursued it as my undergraduate degree. During my undergrad Population Genetics course, I learned about the “Mitochondrial Eve” and was fascinated by the idea that we could use genomics to learn more about the history of populations. That led me to an ancient DNA laboratory for graduate school. I started working on ancient dogs by chance, but really enjoyed studying domestication and the history of domesticated populations. From there my work expanded into humans and their history, especially our past interactions with archaic humans like Neanderthals.
What’s a short overview of what you do and hope to accomplish?
I use computational methods and population genetics to study the genomes of ancient and modern humans and domesticated animals and learn more about their history of migration, admixture and selection. I have two primary goals. My first goal is to learn more about the history of domesticated animal populations and the humans that traveled with them. My second goal is to compare genomes of archaic humans (like Neanderthals and Denisovans) to modern humans to learn more about their history of interactions and also understand the impact of archaic variation on modern human health.
What have you discovered in your research?
A lot of my domestication work has been in dogs, and I’ve demonstrated that dogs migrated with humans to the Americas over 15,000 years ago, but nearly all of the genetic diversity from these ancient dogs was lost due to European colonization. I’ve also been able to show parallels in demographic history between ancient human and dog populations in the Americas. My work in archaic introgression has focused on how archaic variants are distributed across global populations, and I’ve been able to demonstrate that the pattern of archaic variation we see in modern humans is likely due to multiple encounters between archaic and modern humans through time. I’ve also looked at some functional genes, such as pharmacogenes (which code for enzymes that metabolize all sorts of compounds) and, we see evidence that some of these variants may have been inherited from archaic humans.
What do you hope to teach our students?
Beyond teaching concepts in genetics, I hope to instill scientific literacy in students. So many scientific concepts show up in daily life and in news reports, and I want to teach students to be able to interpret the data they see and evaluate it with a critical eye. I hope to do this by teaching students to read scientific papers and understand figures and also by connecting course content to relevant real-world examples so that students can understand how the concepts they learn in our courses are useful in their next steps.
