Rate My Professor Kelsey Witt Dillon

Kelsey Witt Dillon is an assistant professor in the Clemson University Department of Genetics and Biochemistry and the Center for Human Genetics, a position she assumed in 2023. She grew up in Texas and earned her B.S. in Genetics from Texas A&M University in 2012 and her Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. Prior to Clemson, she held postdoctoral positions at the University of California-Merced in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and at Brown University in the Center for Computational and Molecular Biology and the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology.

As a computational biologist and population geneticist, Witt Dillon uses ancient DNA to reconstruct histories of human migrations, diets, and interactions with domesticates. Her primary research employs domesticated populations, such as dogs in the Americas and cattle in East Asia focusing on Mongolia and China, as proxies to understand past human behaviors. She has examined dog remains to infer ancient American population movements and diets. Additionally, her work explores gene flow from archaic humans including Neanderthals and Denisovans into modern populations, analyzing the distribution of archaic variants across global genomes and the functional roles of specific archaic-derived genes.

Key publications include "The Evolutionary History of Dogs in the Americas" (Science, 2018), "Dog domestication and the dual dispersal of people and dogs into the Americas" (PNAS, 2021), "Integrative analysis of DNA, macroscopic remains and stable isotopes of dog coprolites to reconstruct community diet" (Scientific Reports, 2022), "Apportioning archaic variants among modern populations" (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2022), and "The impact of modern admixture on archaic human ancestry in human populations" (Genome Biology and Evolution, 2023). Her contributions have advanced fields of population genomics, archaeogenetics, and human-animal co-evolution.