The Presidential Faculty Award was established by President Christina H. Paxson in the spring of 2013 to recognize members of Brown’s distinguished faculty who are conducting especially important and innovative scholarship. Recipients of the Award are invited to give the Presidential Faculty Lecture to provide an opportunity for faculty members to learn about the work of their colleagues from other disciplines, and receive a research stipend of $5,000.
2023, Spring
Sohini Ramachandran
Director, Data Science Initiative, and Hermon C. Bumpus Professor of Biology
"We Are All Mutants: The Puzzles, Promise, and Predicaments of Human Population Genetics"
Sohini Ramachandran, the Hermon C. Bumpus Professor of Biology and director of the Data Science Initiative at Brown University, is a population geneticist studying the causes and consequences of human genetic variation. Her research has contributed to understanding of the crucial role population dynamics play in both shaping human genetic diversity and our ability to identify adaptive and disease-associated mutations. She completed her Ph.D. at Stanford in 2007 and was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows before launching the Ramachandran Lab at Brown University.