Researcher to Present “The Genetic Atlas of Historic Armenia” at NAASR

Researcher Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan of the Ethnogenomics Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia will present a talk entitled “The Genetic Atlas of Historic Armenia,” on Thursday, November 21, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.

The event will be the first to take place in the new NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building which had its grand opening on November 1. Dr. Yepiskoposyan’s talk will be part of the NAASR/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues and will be held in Batmasian Hall on the third floor of the new building. This program is free and open to the public. A reception will take place after the program in the Shahinian Solarium.

Located at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East, the Armenian Highland (Historic Armenia) served as a transition corridor for major waves of prehistoric and historic migrations. The genetic history of Armenians as an indigenous population of the region attracts keen scientific interest to resolve the puzzle of ancient Middle Eastern populations’ expansion and the spread of Indo-European languages.

Since 2015 Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan has been part of a research team engaged in a project to draw a genetic atlas of historical Armenia in order to reproduce the rich spatial mosaic of the Armenian gene pool across time and space. Working at the cutting-edge of genomic research, Dr. Yepiskoposyan will share his insights into how genetic research is (re)shaping our understanding of Armenian history and the history of the region.

Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan is the head of the Ethnogenomics Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. He is a member of the UCLA-ArmGenia genetic research project, is the director of the Karin Tak Cave excavation team in Artsakh, and has served as the Rector of Artsakh State University and President of the Armenian Anthropological Society. He is the author of more than 90 articles published in peer-review journals and books and is the author, co-author, or editor of four books. While he is in the United States he is participating in the Armenian Genealogy Conferences in Southern California and Fresno on November 16 and 17.

For more information about this program, contact NAASR at 617-489-1610 or hq@naasr.org.