Sohini Ramachandran, a population geneticist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, received two high-profile awards this year. In June, she was named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences by the Pew Charitable Trusts, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and in February, she received a fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. She plans to use the grants to distinguish herself in a fast-moving field.
How did you realize you wanted to combine maths and biology?
It began when I was in high school. Marcus Feldman, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University in California, let me do a project in his lab so that I could enter what is now the Intel Science Talent Search, a pre-university research competition. I studied genetic variation in Arabidopsis thaliana, the plant equivalent of the lab rat, and found that the species moved into the Americas 30,000 years ago, at the same time as humans. I got fourth place. Later, as a computational-science undergraduate at Stanford, I attended a lecture by Feldman in which he estimated the number of females missing from China’s population as a result of the one-child law. I realized how incredible it was that we could use maths to learn so much about human behaviour. I have since used genomics to study topics from historical patterns of human migration to whether genetic variation accounts for differences in cancer-treatment outcomes.
- Date added:
- Aug 23, 2012
- Project:
- Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences
- Topic:
- Biomedical Research
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