Layla Brassington
NIH T32 CoEvoD Fellow, Lea Lab
Layla joined the CoEvoD program as the inaugural third-year trainee supported by the NIH / NIGMS T32 Training Grant in 2025.
A central question in evolutionary medicine is: why do humans remain vulnerable to chronic disease, despite strong selective pressures on survival and reproduction? A leading explanation is the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis—the idea that rapid lifestyle change has created a gap between the environments our genomes evolved in and the ones we inhabit today. Layla’s research addresses this question directly by integrating computational genomics with evolutionary frameworks to study how market-integration shapes immune gene regulation in the Orang Asli of Malaysia, a population undergoing a profound lifestyle transition in Kenya.
Publications:
Brassington, L., Arner, A.M., Watowich, M.M., Damstedt, J., Ng, K.S., Lim, Y.A., Venkataraman, V.V., Wallace, I.J., Kraft, T.S. and Lea, A.J., 2024. Integrating the Thrifty Genotype and Evolutionary Mismatch Hypotheses to understand variation in cardiometabolic disease risk. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 12(1), pp.214-226.
McCoy, B.M., Brassington, L., Jin, K., Dolby, G.A., Shrager, S., Collins, D., Dunbar, M., Ruple, A. and Snyder-Mackler, N., 2023. Social determinants of health and disease in companion dogs: a cohort study from the Dog Aging Project. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 11(1), pp.187-201.