Biography
Bayazit is interested in understanding the evolutionary history of modern human and how this shaped the diversity of phenotypes observed in contemporary populations. His expertise is in population genetics and he uses chip genotyping and next-generation sequencing to characterise human genomic variation. To understand human population history, Bayazit uses coalescent simulations and computational tools that are based on principles of populations genetics. He has studied population history in South Asia, the Middle East and Europe and these works uncovered signals of adaptation in the human genome shared between South Asia and Europe. It was also shown that the genetic diversity in India is second only to that in Africa, suggesting that the diversity resulting from an "out of Africa" migration evolved there, a hypothesis that needs further testing. One of his latest work focused on the population history of temperate Eurasia: a vast region encompassing Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia. It was shown that the admixture of ancestral populations, which were likely separated for over 40 thousand years, has resulted in a complex mosaic of mixed genomes across this vast region. This can be thought of as a natural experiment that combined adaptations to different pathogens, climatic conditions and neutrally accumulated mutations. Bayazit's current focus is to understand how this population history shaped human phenotypes in mixed genomes. Another focus of his current research is to understand how pathogen-driven selection shaped immune-related phenotypes and autoimmune diseases. For this, he uses human cell culturing and immunological experiments.