My research, in Dr. Mark Stoneking's Molecular Anthropolgy group in Leipzig, is focused on studying the molecular evolution of natural variation within and among human groups. Specifically I am interested in the mode of evolution for loci which are of interest to the medical community and anthropologists.  As such, these are loci which are associated with disease and/or are of anthropological interest because of their association with potentially adaptive traits in human groups.
Previous collaborative work has focused on the mode of evolution at candidate genes involved in obesity and energy balance, namely MC4R and UCP1, as well as in the characterization of the putative positive selective event at the TRPV6 locus in multiple human groups. 
Currently, my research is focused on transcriptome variation among human groups. The transcriptome is the transcribed version of the genome, meaning that our source of variation is not DNA but rather RNA. This means that the variation that we are studying is a molecular phenotype; if you like, it is the first phenotype - derived from the static variation in one's genome and the dynamic variation in one's environment.  We are using high-throughput sequencing technologies to sequence RNA libraries (or the transcriptome) of multiple individuals with ancestry derived from four human groups, namely East Asian, South Asian, African and European.  The RNA tissue source for our study is a unique collection of placentas that I sampled in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the aims of our investigation is to quantify the amount of variation found among individuals and among groups, in the human placental transcriptome, and evaluate if such an apportionment of variation is analogous to that which we observe for genetic variation. Such data will allow us to evaluate if the human transcriptome is neutrally evolving and potentially allow us to identify transcripts which may have been subject to positive selection in any human group(s).  These investigations will provide us with an opportunity to evaluate one source of phenotypic variation among individuals on a large scale, and provide us invaluable insights into transcript evolution.