Audrey Margaret Arner

Humans have locally adapted to environmental pressures over evolutionary time, such that populations around the globe are to some degree “matched” to their environments. However, phenotypes that evolve in response to an environment may no longer be advantageous if the environment rapidly changes, potentially leading to “evolutionary mismatch” and decreased fitness in the new environment. Before we incorporate theories of mismatch into our understanding of human evolution and modern-day variation, we need to develop a better understanding of the mechanistic basis of these processes. To do so, I will characterize evolutionary mismatch at the genomic level in partnerships with the Orang Asli of Malaysia, a subsistence-level group that engages in lifestyles on opposite ends of the “matched” to “mismatched” spectrum due to ongoing acculturation, market integration, and urbanization. During pilot data collection, Orang Asli individuals expressed interest in learning more about genomics. Therefore, I will also use qualitative and quantitative, community-driven techniques to develop illustrations tailored to participant communities. Ultimately, this project will illuminate how environmental variation interacts with the genetic architecture of humans to influence adaptation in our evolutionary past and present, while also fulfilling a critical desire of research participants to understand more about human evolutionary genomics research.