Sarah Tishkoff

Sarah A. Tishkoff is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology. She holds appointments in the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts & Sciences, and works at the intersection of biomedicine, human genetics, evolutionary genetics and anthropology.

Overcoming hazards in rural Africa such as lack of electricity and water, Sarah Tishkoff has amassed genetic evidence of early human evolutionary history. She has created the world’s largest database of African diversity derived from genetic samples from more than 9,000 people from 200 distinct ethnic groups. This achievement provides a vital resource for biomedical research to improve diagnostics and therapeutics for Africans and African Americans.

Tishkoff’s scholarship expands understanding of ancestry and culture with data gleaned from genetics and metabolism, and may yield insights on causes and possible new treatments for disease. Chair of the NIH Genetics Variation and Evolution study section and recipient of numerous awards including an NIH Pioneer Award, David and Lucile Packard Career Award and a Burroughs-Welcome Career Award, Tishkoff is known for her novel integration of field, lab and computational research with linguistics and anthropology.

Through her studies of indigenous populations, Tishkoff hopes to identify genetic factors in resistance to diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, and to glean insights to help prevent diabetes and heart disease. She discovered shared ancestry from 30,000 years ago among click-speaking populations currently living in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya. And her studies of lactose intolerance in Eastern Africa have revealed patterns of convergent evolution linked to cattle domestication 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Tishkoff teaches undergraduate courses on genomics, human disease and evolution and publishes in Science, Cell,Nature Genetics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, and the American Journal of Human Genetics. Her collaborations at Penn allow her to continually update her research with new methodologies and insights about epigenetics, metabolic disorders and the microbiome.