Daniel Pereira

I have a graduation in Genetics and Biotechnology from UTAD and I’m currently enrolled in the Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution masters from FCUP.

My main interest lies on the evolution of humans throughout history. For that reason I’m currently doing my thesis at the Department of Life Sciences and Biotechnology‏, Ferrara University, Italy, under the supervision of Professor Guido Barbujani. My thesis is within the framework of the LanGeLin (Languages-Genes Lineages) project, a project that address by state-of-the-art genomic and linguistic approaches one open question, first formulated by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, namely whether cultural transmission and differentiation of languages over the period of human history matches the biological transmission and differentiation of genetic characters.

Within this framework my work will be focused on studying the patterns of diversity of the mtDNA and Y-chr in the context of Eurasian languages diversity, where I will look for the degree of resemblance between patters of genomic and linguistic diversity, and test models describing the historical demographic processes through which genomic and linguistic patterns might have arisen.