Sohini Ramachandran is a population geneticist who studies the causes and consequences of human genetic variation. Her research program seeks to determine the relative roles of population histories versus natural selection in shaping human genetic diversity. She also advocates for countering the extremist weaponization of human genetics research by promoting accurate interpretations of population variation.

As a Human Past Senior Fellow at SCAS, her project will advance ancestry inference methods by addressing “alignment problems” in mixed-membership clustering when integrating ancient and modern human genomes. She will study the robustness of clustering results and analyze patterns of identity-by-descent (IBD) sharing to reconstruct ancient demographic histories and mating practices, and identify targets of natural selection. Ultimately, she focuses on providing more stable tools for studying human expansions, such as the Neolithic and Bantu movements, while analyzing allele frequency trajectories over the last 10,000 years.

Ramachandran has co-authored numerous influential publications across population genetics, machine learning, and functional genomics. Selected works include “Integrating Sex-bias into Studies of Archaic Admixture on Chromosome X” (PLoS Genetics, 2023), “Counter the Weaponization of Genetics Research by Extremists” (Nature, 2022), "Enrichment Analyses Identify Shared Associations for 25 Quantitative Traits in over 600,000 Individuals from Seven Diverse Ancestries” (American Journal of Human Genetics, 2022), and “Pong: Fast Analysis and Visualization of Latent Clusters in Population Genetic Data” (Bioinformatics, 2016).


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.