Genevieve Housman

I am a geneticist interested in primate functional genomics, complex trait evolution, and skeletal development and maintenance.

My research career began in 2011 when I joined Anne Stone’s group at Arizona State University for my graduate studies. In my dissertation, I examined patterns of epigenetic variation in skeletal tissues from nonhuman primates, characterizing regulatory differences between species and associations with complex skeletal traits. After receiving my PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology in 2017, I began a postdoc in Yoav Gilad’s group at the University of Chicago. During my postdoctoral research, I developed skeletal cell culture systems using human and nonhuman primate pluripotent cell lines in order to study gene expression differences in skeletal cell types at population and evolutionary scales, across developmental time points, and in response to environmental perturbations. In 2023, I started my research group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where my team continues to work with cell culture systems, primary skeletal tissues, and genomics methods in order to improve our understanding of the complex relationship between genotype and phenotype in primates.