Beatriz Amorim

I am a PhD student interested in studying human migration and population history, with a particular interest in population genetics.

I developed my MSc thesis (2019-2020) in the HUMANEVOL group (CIBIO-InBIO), with Dr Jorge Rocha as my supervisor and Dr Magdalena Vidal and Dr Anne-Maria Fehn as co-supervisors. The thesis focused on unravelling the demographic history of southern African groups in the context of a proposed Khoe-Kwadi migration. This work followed a multidisciplinary approach that combined genomic and linguistic data and considered ethnographic information to provide robust population contact scenarios. 

My PhD work will be supervised by Dr Jorge Rocha (CIBIO-InBIO) and Dr Mark Stoneking (Max Planck Institute). It will focus on the peoples of the Okavango River Basin (Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe) and follow the same multidisciplinary approach as my masters. In this project, I am interested in decoding historical processes and assessing the importance of language and cultural practices in population contact and admixture. Ultimately, I intend to reconstruct the population history of the Khoisan and Bantu groups that inhabit the Okavango region.