Welcome!

We are proud to announce the launch of TREE - The Tropical Rainforest Education Experiment! Please visit us here.

To download the program TESS Ad-Mixer, please click here.

Our lab addresses questions at the interface of biology and anthropology. We use modern molecular genetics to investigate questions of interest to anthropologists and biologists concerning the evolutionary relationships, origins, histories, population structures and migration patterns of humans, primates and other taxa. One of the key issues in this field of research is to reconstruct how evolutionary forces (mutation, migration, drift and selection) have shaped and maintained genetic variation in contemporary primate populations. For example, great apes possess about two to six times the genetic diversity of humans and appear to have evolutionary histories that differ from each other and from humans. Yet studies of intraspecific genetic variation among apes have lagged far behind those of humans, despite their importance in illuminating differences in the processes involved in speciation and in understanding the paleodemographic histories of populations of each species. Our main research projects at the moment focus on illuminating the population histories of chimpanzees inhabiting Cameroon and Nigeria which encompass the Gulf of Guinea Biodiversity region. As part of this research, current projects in the Gonder Lab aim to illuminate the genetic consequences of the paleodemographic processes in a variety of taxa, particularly among vertebrates inhabiting the Gulf of Guinea region. To achieve these goals, research in the Gonder Lab has both field and laboratory components.