Reyhan Yaka

Over the past eight years, during my Master’s and PhD studies I have been analyzing ancient DNA data, studying human population genetics and genetic bases of human evolution. During my PhD, my focus was mainly archaeogenomic analysis of sedentary populations in Neolithic Anatolia. In this project I worked on both wet-lab and computational analyses, generating new ancient genomes from Neolithic Anatolia and performing both population genetics and genetic kinship analyses using ancient genomic data. The results of my PhD work provide the first insight into deeper understanding of genetic relationships among house-related individuals and also the social structures of Neolithic societies in Anatolia. Additionally, in my PhD, I was involved in the development of wet-lab protocols (e.g. optimization of whole genome capture method for poorly-preserved ancient human samples) suitable to the highly degraded nature of ancient DNA.
My current project focuses on polygenic analysis of ancient human populations.