My research goal is to understand public health issues through the lens of a population geneticist, behavioural ecologist, and microbial ecologist. At the present, I am involved in a population study of the relationship between human genetics, microbiome composition, human behaviour, and environmental variance in several locations in Indonesia. I study how lifestyle change has affected the health of select Indonesian populations and whether their history has left marks in their genome and gut microbiome composition. My PhD project is about tropical hunter-gatherers of island Southeast Asia. I believe that analysing the mobility of hunter-gathering groups in Island South-East Asia, along with their genetics, diet, and the microbiome may lead to the discovery of different sets of evolutionary drivers of human genetic diversity that were not present in settled populations. Hence, there could be some insight into the processes that impacted present-day biological state and health status.
