Joanna Mountain

Who is Joanna Mountain?

Dr. Joanna Mountain joined 23andMe from Stanford University where, as a

faculty member within the Anthropological Sciences and Genetics

Departments, she specialized in human evolutionary genetics. Dr.

Mountain received her Ph.D. degree in Genetics from Stanford University

in 1994, having completed a B.S. degree through Stanford's Mathematical

Sciences program in 1984. Following her undergraduate program Dr.

Mountain spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching at a

community school near the Kenyan coast. She remains particularly

interested in the cultural, linguistic, and genetic diversity of

Africa. After receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Mountain conducted postdoctoral

research on human population genetics within the Integrative Biology

Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Broadly speaking, Dr. Mountain's areas of interest include:

phenotype and the interactions among genotype, environment, and

culture; the extent to which genetic data can reveal details of human

history; comparisons of genetic and linguistic variation among human

populations; ethical issues regarding human genetics; biology,

genetics, and concepts of race and ethnicity; the origins of and

relationships among the peoples of Africa; and the development of

statistical tools for analyzing population genetic data.

Dr. Mountain has published scientific papers on a broad range of

topics, from the genetic diversity of click-speaking peoples of eastern

and southern Africa, to algorithms for discovering geographic ancestry

of individuals, to the nature of the relationship between genetic

diversity and categories of race and ethnicity. She has been the

recipient of a number of academic awards, including grants from the

National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.