Darwin Day Lecture 2025: The Origin of the Peoples of Europe

The HAI is delighted to announce that Dr. Lara Cassidy, Assistant Professor in Genetics, will deliver our 2025 Darwin Day lecture. The event takes place in Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday 12th February 2025 at 7pm. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

### About Dr. Cassidy

Lara Cassidy graduated in Human Genetics from Trinity College Dublin in 2013, receiving a gold medal for her academic achievements. She worked briefly as a research assistant under Professor Jun Kitano at the National Institute of Genetics in Japan, publishing on speciation in stickleback fish populations. She was subsequently awarded a scholarship by the Irish Research Council to pursue a Ph.D. in ancient genomics at Professor Dan Bradley’s lab at the Department of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, which she was awarded in 2018. Her doctoral focus was the application of next generation sequencing technologies to the study of Irish prehistory, which resolved longstanding questions on the origins of the modern population. She expanded upon this work as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Bradley, before soon joining the staff at the Department of Genetics as an assistant professor in 2020.

Throughout her career, Lara has published extensively and with wide-reaching impact in ancient genomics. Her research has been repeatedly featured in top journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS and Nature Communications and covered by major international news outlets (New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, BBC). In 2019, she was awarded an honorary life fellowship at the Galton Institute in recognition of her contribution to her field. Her current research focus is the construction of a dense temporal dataset of ancient Irish genomes, in collaboration with archaeological colleagues from diverse institutes across Ireland and Britain. Three main avenues of inquiry have arisen from this project:

1. Leveraging Ireland’s insularity and long-term genetic continuity to study the evolutionary forces that have shaped human health and disease
2. Reconstructing prehistoric social structures and cultural practices through patterns of relatedness and inbreeding
3. Optimising molecular and computational pipelines to establish best practices in field from both a research and ethical standpoint.