Chris Kendall Selected as a Trainee Under the CANSSI STAGE Program.

CANSSI STAGE is pleased to announce that Chris has been selected as a CANSSI STAGE Trainee with his project, “The Role of Archaic Variants on Human Mental Health Disorders.”

Chris is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Neurosciences and Mental Health Research Program at The Hospital for Sick Children, where he is conducting research under the supervision of Drs. Jennifer Crosbie,Esteban Parra,  and Michael Wainberg.

Before embarking on his postdoctoral journey, he earned a doctorate from the University of Toronto in Evolutionary Anthropology in 2025. He was awarded the NSERC CGS-D Alexander Graham Bell Award in 2019 and received the Teaching Assistant of the Year Award in 2022, a competitive intra-university honor, at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Chris has previously made contributions in ancient DNA and evolutionary and population genetics, researching archaic adaptive introgression in human circadian rhythm and reproductive genes. He has also applied global and local ancestry estimation methods in non-human primate populations to identify cryptic admixture in captive baboons.

His CANSSI STAGE project aims to understand how genetic variants inherited from Neanderthals and Denisovans influence mental health in modern humans, by comparing the effects, heritability, evolutionary history, and biological function of archaic and modern human genetic variants across a wide range of mental health disorders and diverse populations.

CANSSI STAGE is proud to support Chris in his research endeavors and looks forward to his contributions in evolutionary and statistical genetics, particularly at the intersection of archaic introgression and mental health.