There's a real sense of community at Emma,
it's great to live and work with such a diverse
group of people
Dr Cecilia Padilla Iglesias
BSc, MPhil, PhD
Research Fellow
Biography
I grew up in the province of Almería, in coastal southern Spain. I then undertook an undergraduate degree in Human Sciences at University College London, where I learnt how to explore evolutionary questions from a diverse array of perspectives and in a diverse set of organisms. During this time, I developed a passion for communicating science and got involved in organizing workshops, podcasts, museum events and all sorts of activities aimed at bringing research closer to the broader public.
I arrived first to Cambridge for a research MPhil in Biological Anthropological Sciences, where I explored what social and ecological factors promote the maintenance (and conversely, erosion) of cultural and linguistic diversity in a population undergoing rapid socio-economic transitions in the Yucatán Península. I then moved to Zürich to pursue a PhD looking at the relationship between ecology, population and cultural dynamics at much deeper timescales - and in doing so try to understand how environmental changes throughout evolutionary history have shaped the ability of people to move, migrate and interact with one another, and the implications this may have for the origins of our species.
I'm now a Research Fellow at Emmanuel as well as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Zoology. At the same time, I'm a Public Scholars Training Fellow at Sapiens, where I work on science communication.
Research
Humans are unusual in the animal world. Long before the origins of agriculture or industrial technologies, our ancestors had managed to inhabit most of the planet’s ecosystems. It is because of this that I seek to understand how members of our species managed to generate the enormous cultural, behavioural and genetic diversity that has allowed us to thrive in such a diverse array of environments.
Since for the most part of our evolution, humans lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, my current research focuses on investigating the social and ecological drivers of individual’s mobility decisions, and how these determine genetic and cultural evolutionary patterns. To do so, I combine methods and data from genetics, computational modelling, archaeology and fieldwork research among the BaYaka hunter-gatherers in the Republic of Congo.
Spotlights
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Tobias Wauer – a report from the COVID-19 testing front line
It’s 8pm and I’m about to start a 12-hour shift at the national COVID-19 testing centre in Milton Keynes. Truckloads of boxes with transparent plastic bags just arrived and a brief announcement is made: 15,000 patient swabs. For now, the mood among the team is cheerful and enthusiastic, but I know it will have morphed into exhaustion and fatigue by the end of the night.