Talk summary: Does our genetic code cary instructions for formation of social networks? Ongoing research in our lab starts to address this question by exploring genomics of partner choice, friendship, and traditional human communities. We are also interested in the co-evolution of the human immunolome and microbiome across different cultures and structures of social organization. This talk will discuss our work in progress, describing how our lab uses a combination of behavioral experiments, genotyping, field interventions and applied data science approaches. 

 

Speaker bio: Marcus Alexander is a Research Associate in the Human Nature Lab at the Yale Institute for Network Science. He received his PhD from Harvard and his postdoctoral training at Stanford. His research is focused at the intersection of biology and the social sciences.