Black, Brown and Green Voices: Dr. Lara Cassidy, Geneticist, Trinity College Dublin

Dr. Lara Cassidy is an Assistant Professor of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin. She holds a Ph.D. in Palaeogenomics from TCD's Smurfit Institute of Genetics where she was an awardee of a postgraduate scholarship by the Irish Research Council. Her doctoral focus was the application of DNA sequencing technologies to the study of Irish prehistory, which resolved longstanding questions on the origins of the modern population. Her group's current research focus is the creation of a dense temporal dataset of ancient Irish genomes. The dataset is used to study the evolutionary forces that have shaped human health and disease on the island, as well as to reconstruct prehistoric social structures and cultural practices through patterns of relatedness and inbreeding. Dr. Cassidy will be in conversation with Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey about Lara's research on the hunter-gatherer populations who lived in Ireland prior to the arrival of agriculture. Forensic prediction techniques suggest these people had dark skin and blue eyes and were relatively isolated from related populations in Britain and Europe.

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Black, Brown and Green Voices represent a documentation strategy and public humanities initiative which aims to amplify the diversity of the Irish diaspora by recording interviews with Black and Brown Irish Americans and those who speak to the Black experience in Ireland. The project director is historian Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey who has been based at New York University since 2008 and is a founding board member of the African American Irish Diaspora Network. This series of programs is presented by the African American Irish Diaspora Network in collaboration with Glucksman Ireland House, NYU.