I am applying to this PhD student ship and idk if my answer is too vague or not specific enough. The character limit (1500) is not letting me say much so I said this:
What motivates and excites you about pursuing a career in research? Tell us about the area you would like to pursue your PhD in and why?
As a population geneticist and computational biologist, I aim to integrate genetics with linguistics, geography, and history to understand how human populations spread, how culture and biology interacted through movement and contact, and how this shaped genetic structure, selection and variation over time.
This focus grew from my undergraduate research with Dr xxx, where I led an independent project on the spatio-temporal population genetics of xxx, a region of deep admixture among modern humans and, recent evidence suggests, hominins. When my local ancestry inference methods failed to separate Eurasian populations, I turned to ancient DNA analysis. What seemed to be the end of my project showed me that modern populations are poor proxies for ancestral ones, and that even advanced methods can obscure complex histories of migration and admixture. What I first saw as a barrier became a corridor to the career I hope to pursue.
That shift in thinking is what I hoped to pass on as co-founder of the xxx Machine Learning Student Interest Group, giving talks on broadening how we think about methods of ancestry inference to help underclassmen make the same leap in how they see the field, something I hope to keep doing as a professor and scientist.
I now want to expand my questions to the genealogical analysis of ancient populations and archaic hominins, and to developing methods that model past populations directly, to understand the genomic history that shaped human genetics across time and space.
For context this is an ancient dna lab
Please help a confused first timer 😭😭