Javier Blanco Portillo

I aim to construct an interdisciplinary framework that links historical findings in Polynesia and Latin America to medical insights, gene-culture coevolution, and linguistics. People of multiple ancestries make up more than one-third of the US population, including African American and Hispanic/Latino individuals, and in the future it is expected that admixed populations will be even more prevalent. It is therefore crucial to develop ancestry-specific methodologies for personalized healthcare research. I will also work to extend ancestry-specific techniques developed for these goals to cross-dataset comparisons for the study of creole (admixed) languages, as well as for gene-culture coevolution across the Pacific.