Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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Mircea is deeply fascinated by the amazing human diversity. As a biologist interested in the history and variation of human populations, he works in the interdisciplinary space defined by the boundaries between genetics, evolution and anthropology. During his PhD at Cambridge University, which included six months of fieldwork in Southern India, he studied the genetics of human pigmentation diversity among the Indian populations. He is now aiming to build on the results of his PhD research to further the understanding on the various evolutionary forces and their complex interplay that drive human phenotypic variation in India, and across the world.
My PhD project in Human Evolutionary Genetics dealt with unravelling the diversity and genetics of human pigmentation in the populations of India. This research has been collaborative and interdisciplinary by definition and has led to valuable insights, yet also further questions, into how human pigmentation has evolved. First, I conducted six months of fieldwork in South India, time during which I recorded data from over 1400 individuals and performed genetic analyses. I then carried out extensive statistical analyses on the obtained phenotypic and genetic data. The results of this work point to one genetic locus as having a major effect on Indian skin pigmentation variation and, more intriguingly, suggest that, rather than natural selection, demographic and sexual selection forces have been instrumental in shaping human skin colour diversity among the populations of India.
As a natural continuation, immediate future research would apply an integrative approach to test the theories put forward by my PhD project. For this, anthropological surveys would be extended to populations from across India to obtain an in depth coverage of the phenotypic variation among all the geographic regions, and all the linguistic and social groups. This would be complemented in the near future by a carefully planned genome-wide study including different Indian populations in order to unravel the still unknown genetic components influencing skin colour variation across India. Furthermore, moving beyond the study of the pigmentation visible phenotype, a major component of future research regards the study of the effect of lifestyle and environment (culture), with a focus on immunity and nutrition, on human diversity among populations of South Asia and around the Indian Ocean.
