The Penn State University Nittany AI Challenge recently advanced top student teams to the next phase of funding, recognizing projects that address real institutional challenges through innovative technology. Originally developed from the system I created for BIOL 220, MatchMyLab grew through collaboration with second-year undergraduate students Julien Mutton and Gustavo Foz Rodrigues into a scalable, high-performing platform. Now supporting BIOL 110, 220, 230, and 240 which serve 3,610 students across 155 lab sections, MatchMyLab reduces a weeks-long TA scheduling process to seconds, ensures equitable TA workload distribution, and significantly reduces administrative burden while improving accuracy and flexibility in course coordination.

This Penn State University research news article highlights our Nature Communications study showing that the spread of farming across Europe was driven primarily by migrating farmers rather than by local hunter-gatherers adopting agriculture. Analyzing ancient DNA from 618 individuals and integrating it with computational simulations, we quantified the relative roles of migration and cultural transmission. Our findings indicate that cultural adoption played only a minimal role, with farmers largely mating within their own groups. The work demonstrates how combining genetics, archaeology, and computational modeling can reveal the demographic forces shaping major transitions in human history.

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The Neolithic Revolution marked the transition from foraging to farming, long debated as a product of cultural diffusion versus demic diffusion. Using mathematical models, agent-based simulations, and ancient DNA analysis, we evaluate the relative roles of cultural transmission and between-group mating in farming’s expansion. Our results reveal limited cultural diffusion, predominantly within-group mating, and challenge the assumption that demic expansion necessarily results in ancestry turnover, offering new insights into early agricultural society.