Dr. Katerina Guschanski

Institute of Evolutionary Biology
School of Biological Sciences
The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK

Katerina Guschanski is an evolutionary geneticist who studies how genetic diversity and the interaction of organisms with their environment change through time and space and how climatic and anthropogenic factors contribute to this change. To tackle these broad questions, she is working at the intersection of ecology, molecular biology, large-scale comparative and functional genomics, and bioinformatics. Current research projects range from quantifying the effects of human-driven population decline on genetic diversity and evolutionary potential of great apes, speciation in primates, and the evolution of host-associated microbiomes through time, over demographic transitions, and in response to drastic environmental change. Katerina did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology studying the molecular ecology of mountain gorillas. She then took up a postdoctoral researcher position at Imperial College London and later an EMBO and HFSP funded postdoc at the University of Lausanne. From 2015 to 2020, Katerina was a group leader at Uppsala University. Since 2020, she is a Senior Lecturer in Genomics at the University of Edinburgh, UK.