Bárbara Bitarello
She/Her
I am queer and I am a human geneticist/evolutionary biologist.//
I have loved animals and fungi since as far as I can remember. In my teens, I became very interested in all things human: psychology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, etc. My interest in genetics arose in high school, when I read the book ‘Genes, peoples, and languages’ by Luigi Lucca Cavalli-Sforza, which I later found out was a giant in the field of human population genetics. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, I am trying to understand why phenotypic predictions based on genetic data are so different across different ancestries and, as a consequence, I hope our findings help support reducing the diversity gap in human genetics. I have many hobbies, including singing, drawing, and, lately, gardening. I’m very into plants. Caring for them is very grounding and rewarding.