​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.