Abigail Bigham

Associate Professor
Department: Anthropology
awbigham@anthro.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Science, Tibet, Peru

Abigail Bigham earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Penn State University in 2008. She was then a Senior Fellow in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Medical Genetics at the University of Washington before joining the faculties in Anthropology, first at the University of Michigan and then at UCLA. Her research centers on human population genetics and molecular evolution. In particular, her research group seeks to understand human genetic adaptations to environmental pressures, such as high altitude adaptations among Indigenous communities in Peru and the Himalayas, and how these adaptations affect human phenotypic diversity. She has published her research in high-profile journals, including PLosONE, American Journal of Medical Genetics A, PLOS Genetics, and Nature Genetics.