Faculty Spotlight: Brenna Henn

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Faculty Spotlight: Brenna Henn

Brenna Henn

Brenna Henn began her PhD by studying the deep population structure and complex migration patterns of African hunter-gatherer groups. She continues to have an interest in diverse, indigenous populations from around the world who harbor genetic (and linguistic and phenotypic) variation that is often overlooked in more commonly studied urban populations. Motivated by her prior PhD (2009) training in anthropology and evolutionary genetics at Stanford University, she aims to approach questions of genetic and phenotypic diversity from an interdisciplinary standpoint.

After her PhD, Dr. Henn enjoyed a ‘personal genomics’ interlude at 23andMe, Inc., working on their ancestry team and doing research development with Dr. Joanna Mountain. She then began a postdoctoral position in Dr. Carlos Bustamante’s lab (2010) in the Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine. During the postdoc, Dr. Henn led several African genomic projects aimed at understanding the origins of modern humans and dispersals Out-of-Africa. Dr. Henn joined Stony Brook University, SUNY in 2013, and will join UC Davis in January 2018.