Brenna Henn

Brenna Henn is a population geneticist in the Department of Anthropology and in the Genome Center at the University of California Davis. She began her research by studying the deep population structure and complex migration patterns of African hunter-gatherer groups. Motivated by her PhD (2009, Stanford University) training in anthropology, she aims to approach questions of genomic and phenotypic diversity from an interdisciplinary standpoint. She continues to primarily focus on African populations. Her field sites include efforts to collect DNA samples, demographic data and biomedical phenotypes in the Kalahari Desert, Cederberg Mountains and the Richtersveld of South Africa, as well as collaborations in Namibia and Ethiopia. The Henn Lab is committed to understanding genetic diversity in under-represented populations. Her long-term objective as an independent investigator is to extend trait mapping and evolutionary genetic techniques to identify loci associated with biomedical traits in diverse populations where collection of large cohort sizes remains challenging.