CCMB Announces Emilia Huerta-Sanchez as new Director

CCMB is pleased to announce Emilia Huerta-Sanchez as CCMB Director, effective July 1, 2024.

Emilia Heurta-Sanchez Headshot We are so thankful for Dan Weinreich and his leadership of CCMB for the last three years. Starting this July, Emilia Huerta-Sanchez will take on the mantle of CCMB Director.

Huerta-Sanchez's laboratory develops theoretical, computational and data-driven approaches to reveal how evolutionary processes have shaped human genetic variation, and has contributed extensively to our understanding of the impact of interbreeding with archaic humans. She is an MPI on the Biological Data Science T32, funded by the NIH, European Research Council, and the Human Frontier Science Program. Huerta-Sanchez's research has earned her many accolades, including a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Welcome, Emilia!

"As Director, I am excited to work alongside trainees, faculty, and staff to sustain and further enhance our remarkable CCMB community. At CCMB, we value collaboration, diversity, and interdisciplinary research, which enable our community to innovate and consistently produce groundbreaking, multidisciplinary research."

Emilia Huerta-Sanchez

Director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Graduate Program Co-Director for the Center of Computational Molecular Biology, Associate Professor Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

emilia_huerta-sanchez@brown.edu

Research Profile

Huerta-Sanchez Lab

Emilia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB) at Brown University. Emilia is interested in integrating theoretical, computational and statistical modeling to address questions in human evolutionary biology. Her current research interests involve scanning human genomes from different populations to detect mutations in genes that have helped humans adapt to different environments like different diets, temperatures, pathogens and altitudes.

She completed her PhD in Applied Mathematics with Rick Durrett and Carlos Bustamante at Cornell University. Her postdoc was at the University of California Berkeley in the Departments of Statistics and Integrative Biology where she worked with Rasmus Nielsen. Before moving to Brown University, she was a faculty member at the University of California Merced.