Dr. Lara Cassidy

Lara Cassidy graduated in Human Genetics from Trinity College Dublin in 2013, receiving a gold medal for her academic achievements. She worked as a research assistant under Prof. Jun Kitano at the National Institute of Genetics in Japan, publishing on speciation in stickleback fish populations. She was subsequently awarded a scholarship by the Irish Research Council to pursue a Ph.D. in ancient genomics at Prof. Dan Bradley's lab at the Trinity, which she was awarded in 2018. Her doctoral focus was the application of next generation sequencing technologies to the study of Irish prehistory, which resolved longstanding questions on the origins of the modern population. She expanded upon this work as a postdoctoral researcher, before soon joining the staff at the Department of Genetics as an assistant professor in 2020. Throughout her career, Lara has published extensively and with wide-reaching impact in ancient genomics. Her research has been repeatedly featured in top journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS and Nature Communications and covered by major international news outlets (New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, BBC). In 2019, she was awarded an honorary life fellowship at the Adelphi Genetics Forum.

  Archaeology   Genetic Selection   Genetics   Genomes, Genomics   Molecular Biology

Our group is is working to create a dense temporal catalogue of Irish genetic variation across 10,000 years of the island's habitation. Within this there are several major streams of inquiry: 1. Natural Selection and Disease: Leveraging the unique case study that Ireland presents, as an isolated island with long-term demographic continuity, to study the genomic architecture of mutational load, disease and selective forces. 2. Demography: Characterising prehistoric and Medieval demography in Ireland, Britain and further afield using haplotype-based approaches to provide fine-scale resolution. This includes defining the geographic and cultural forces that have encouraged the build up and break down of genetic structure across Ireland and Europe through time. 3. Social Organisation: Ancient genomes also provide evidence of kinship and descent systems in the absence of written records. They can inform on social stratification, inequality and elite mobility, allowing us to reconstruct the social structure of past societies. 4. Microbiome and Pathogen Evolution: Alongside human genomes we are also carrying out a large survey ancient microbiomes, documenting shifts associated with dietary transitions and host-pathogen co-evolution.