Dr Aida Andrés

Dr Aida Andrés obtained her PhD at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and performed postdoctoral work at Cornell University and the National Institutes of Health (USA) before moving, in 2010, to Leipzig (Germany) to launch a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She moved to London in 2017 to join the UCL Genetics Institute, where she is Associate Professor in Evolutionary Genomics.

Dr Andrés is interested in how organisms adapt to their environment. In her work, this means analysing genomes, both modern and ancient, to infer how natural selection mediates genetic adaptations. Most of her work has been on humans, as they have an interesting history of fast colonization of diverse habitats, and in endangered primates, where the ability to adapt to quickly changing environments is crucial for survival. The group is particularly interested in the types of natural selection that maintain diversity within populations or that create differences among populations, as well as adaptive introgression. Her group has made major contributions to our current understanding of the genetics and evolution of modern humans, archaic humans and non-human primates.