Sohini Ramachandran

Ramachandran's parents were both professors.^[1] In the summer before her senior year of high school, Ramachandran completed a research project in plant genomics under the guidance of Marcus Feldman, which won her the fourth place prize in the 1998 Westinghouse Science Talent Search,^[2] where when she was the youngest finalist in the group.^[3] Ramachandran earned a B.S. from Stanford University in 2002. She went on to complete a Ph.D. at Stanford University in the Department of Biological Sciences, advised by Marcus Feldman. Her dissertation research was dissertation was titled "The signature of historical migrations on human population genetic data."^[4] Following her PhD, she was in the Harvard Society of Fellows as a postdoctoral researcher with John Wakeley in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.^[5] She moved to Brown University in 2010 and was promoted to professor in 2021.^[5] In 2019, she was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.^[6]

Ramachandran's research group uses statistical and mathematical modeling techniques to study evolutionary biology and population genetics. Her early research examined the genetic relationships originating within people from Africa,^[7][8] where she showed that diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases.^[9] She has also investigated the use of genetic tools to track infectious diseases^[10][11] and shown that while more outbreaks are occurring, fewer people are getting infected.^[12] She has also shown a lack of genetic evidence for selection for language at the FOXP2 site.^[13]

• Li, Jun Z.; Absher, Devin M.; Tang, Hua; Southwick, Audrey M.; Casto, Amanda M.; Ramachandran, Sohini; Cann, Howard M.; Barsh, Gregory S.; Feldman, Marcus; Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi L.; Myers, Richard M. (2008-02-22). "Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation". Science. 319 (5866): 1100–1104. Bibcode:2008Sci...319.1100L. doi:10.1126/science.1153717. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 18292342. S2CID 53541133.
• Ramachandran, Sohini; Deshpande, Omkar; Roseman, Charles C.; Rosenberg, Noah A.; Feldman, Marcus W.; Cavalli-Sforza, L. Luca (2005). "Support from the relationship of genetic and geographic distance in human populations for a serial founder effect originating in Africa". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (44): 15942–15947. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10215942R. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507611102. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 1276087. PMID 16243969.
• Wang, Sijia; Lewis, Cecil M. Jr.; Jakobsson, Mattias; Ramachandran, Sohini; Ray, Nicolas; Bedoya, Gabriel; Rojas, Winston; Parra, Maria V.; Molina, Julio A.; Gallo, Carla; Mazzotti, Guido (2007-11-23). "Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans". PLOS Genetics. 3 (11): e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185. ISSN 1553-7404. PMC 2082466. PMID 18039031.
• Ramachandran, Sohini; Rosenberg, Noah A.; Zhivotovsky, Lev A.; Feldman, Marcus W. (2004). "Robustness of the inference of human population structure: A comparison of X-chromosomal and autosomal microsatellites". Human Genomics. 1 (2): 87–97. doi:10.1186/1479-7364-1-2-87. ISSN 1479-7364. PMC 3525066. PMID 15601537.

In 2012, Ramachandran received a Sloan Research Fellowship^[14] and was named a Pew Scholar.^[15] From Brown University she has received the Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship (2016)^[16] and the Philip J. Bray Award for excellence in teaching.^[17] In 2019, she received a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.^[18][19]

• Research group website

• Sohini Ramachandran publications indexed by Google Scholar