Dr Florin Mircea Iliescu

As a natural continuation, immediate future research would apply an integrative approach to test the theories put forward by my PhD project. For this, anthropological surveys would be extended to populations from across India to obtain an in depth coverage of the phenotypic variation among all the geographic regions, and all the linguistic and social groups. This would be complemented in the near future by a carefully planned genome-wide study including different Indian populations in order to unravel the still unknown genetic components influencing skin colour variation across India. Furthermore, moving beyond the study of the pigmentation visible phenotype, a major component of future research regards the study of the effect of lifestyle and environment (culture), with a focus on immunity and nutrition, on human diversity among populations of South Asia and around the Indian Ocean.