​Austin joined the lab in 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher. Before coming to UC Davis, he completed his PhD in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked on questions related to the demographic history of Mexico. In the Henn Lab, Austin is working with several genomic datasets from Southern Africa to explore questions about our deep prehistoric past and what impacts they may have on the health of people today. He is broadly interested in using modern and ancient genomic datasets from diverse populations to better understand the genetic architecture of disease, as well as human demographic and evolutionary history.