Luisa is interested in evolutionary and systems genetics, with a particular focus on complex traits. Luisa has studied the genetic architecture of craniofacial shape in wild and outbred populations of the house mouse by combining 3D geometric morphometric and GWAS. She identified and validated several loci associated with shape variation and showed that between-individual variation is highly heritable and highly polygenic. Luisa is now exploring not only the role that genetics plays in complex traits, but how genotype-by-environment interactions regulate organismal complexity. Using a genetically diverse population of fruit flies, she’s performing experiments to understand how, at the individual level, gene expression networks respond to stressful conditions.
