Carter Clinton
Student
Genetic Anthropologist
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Affiliation
Graduate student
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Hometown
Brooklyn, New York
Quote
I think it’s very important to address and combat the paucity of data on African peoples. Discovering one's ancestry and genomic identity is pertinent to the way in which they self-identify and are able to efficiently address generational health issues.Biography
Carter Clinton is a Ph.D. candidate conducting groundbreaking research in the field of genetic anthropology. He has been selected for numerous awards and honors, including the 2017-2018 Just-Julian assistantship as well as 2018 Graduate Student of the Year. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Clinton seeks to reconstruct the daily lives of people who have traditionally been excluded from history. He focuses his doctoral research at Howard University on the soil of the New York African Burial Ground, where enslaved Africans were laid to rest. By performing soil chemistry, bacterial DNA, and geospatial analysis, Clinton presented a new discovery regarding the diets of African slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries. In March 2019, the Cosmos Foundation selected Clinton as a Cosmos Scholar for his proposal titled "Next generation sequencing of bacterial DNA found in New York African Burial Ground soil samples". Clinton's research is also featured in Nature Scientific Reports, a subjournal of the #1 science journal in the world, and can be accessed on the Nature website.