Marta Ciccarella

Marta Ciccarella is PhD student of the Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution BIODIV Doctoral Program at the Faculdade de Ciencias of the University of Porto. After the bachelor studies in Biological Sciences, she graduated with honours in Biodiversity and Evolution at the University of Bologna, and further attended post-graduate advanced courses in the fields of human population genetics and programming for bio-informatics. Recently, she pursued the Master 2 in Bio-informatics at the University of Paris, while working as Research engineer at a major French Sequencing Center. Her main research interest is the anthropological genetics of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Unravelling the origins of slave-descendent populations from current genetic data, using attention to asymmetric admixture, likely between African females and European males. Contrasting autosomal and sex-specific genetic markers, she aims at disentangling the female and male demographic historyies during admixture and reconstructing the past influence of gender-specific socio-cultural behaviours. Proposing a novel methodological approach using machine-learning Approximate Bayesian Computation, with the aim to infer complex sex-specific admixture histories in Cape Verde and São Tomé e Principe, two of the earliest European colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa and important hubs of the Atlantic Slave Trade.