Joanna Mountain
Senior Director of Research , 23andMe

Dr. Joanna Mountain is a Senior Director of Research at 23andMe, Inc. of Mountain View, California, a company that provides consumers with access to personal genetic information. Dr. Mountain is also a consulting faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University where she has specialized in the study of human evolutionary genetics. Dr. Mountain received her Ph.D. degree in Genetics from Stanford University having completed a B.S. degree through Stanford’s Mathematical Sciences program. After receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Mountain conducted postdoctoral research on human population genetics within the Integrative Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Broadly speaking, Dr. Mountain’s areas of interest include: phenotype and the interactions among genotype, environment, and culture; the extent to which genetic data can reveal details of human history; comparisons of genetic and linguistic variation among human populations; ethical issues regarding human genetics; biology, genetics, and concepts of race and ethnicity; the origins of and relationships among the peoples of Africa; and the development of statistical tools for analyzing population genetic data. Dr. Mountain has published scientific papers on a broad range of topics, from the genetic diversity of click-speaking peoples of eastern and southern Africa, to algorithms for discovering geographic ancestry of individuals, to the nature of the relationship between genetic diversity and categories of race and ethnicity. She has been the recipient of a number of academic awards, including grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.