Serena Tucci

Serena Tucci is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Principal Investigator of the Human Evolutionary Genomics Laboratory at Yale University.

Dr. Tucci’s research addresses fundamental questions in human evolution and population history using DNA from present-day and ancient humans. Her interdisciplinary approach combines expertise from anthropology, population genetics, and computational biology, to reconstruct past demographic events and disentangle the genetic basis of human adaptation. By integrating field work, laboratory work and cutting-edge computational methods, her work sheds light on mechanisms of evolutionary change, and on the genetic legacy that extinct humans - such as Neandertals and the enigmatic Denisovans - left in the genomes of human populations in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania. Prior to joining Yale, she conducted postdoctoral research at the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. She was supported by the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research from the American Philosophical Society. Tucci received her Ph.D. in Evolutionary and Environmental Biology from the University of Ferrara in Italy, where she was awarded the Young Investigator Fellowship in 2013 and 2015.