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When Chengzhen Dai set out to investigate the influence of US geography on human genetics a few years ago, the study made a somewhat unusual addition to the work of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, whose projects typically focus on solar power, climate, waste streams, and other urban questions. But Dai saw it as fitting. Researchers at the lab, where he was doing his master’s, are interested in how humans move around and interact with one another, he explains. As he and his colleagues planned the study, “we had the hypothesis that cities, and in a broader sense, geography has played a major role in how ancestry and admixture occurs.”
Dai, now a software engineer at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and his advisor, designer and engineer Carlo Ratti, teamed up with population geneticist Alicia Martin of the Broad Institute and other colleagues to ...
