Aida Andres

Prof. Aida Andrés is Professor in Population and Evolutionary Genomics at University College London (UCL), and Director of the UCL Genetics Institute (UGI).  

She is an evolutionary population geneticist that investigates how populations evolve and adapt to their environment. Her work focuses on how humans have genetically adapted to the diversity of habitats we inhabit today, and how these past adaptations shape both our genomes and phenotypes today. A focus of her work is to understand the evolutionary origins of human diversity and of disease-driving genetic variants. In parallel, her group uses evolutionary population genomics to establish how endangered primates adapt to novel and changing environments, with the aim of aiding conservation efforts.  

She obtained her PhD from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), obtaining postdoctoral training at Cornell University (NY, USA) and the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH (MD, USA), before launching her research group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) and moving to London in 2017 to join UCL.