Dr. Michael St. Clair holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Dr. St. Clair attended introductory biology, chemistry, and anthropology courses to satisfy the core curriculum requirements. This provided a foundation for exploring the potential of genetic data as a tool for linguistic research. In 2012, he delivered a presentation at a linguistics conference in order to showcase data from his dissertation. He explained that Y-chromosome variation in Europe helps to decipher the prehistory of Germanic languages. Afterwards a member of the audience suggested that his argument would be more persuasive by demonstrating the usefulness of Y-chromosome data for non-Germanic languages. In 2013, he started work on the Genetic-Linguistic Interface project. The project had two goals. The first goal was to acquire sufficient data. A database was ultimately constructed to manage the large volume of information uncovered by his research. The second goal was to develop a methodology for employing genetic data as a tool for linguistic research. Dr. St. Clair published an open access monograph in 2021 which explains his methodological solution.
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