The Tsosie Lab for Indigenous Genomic Data Equity and Justice is an interdisciplinary project team led by Dr. Krystal Tsosie, PhD, MPH, MA (Diné/Navajo Nation), in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. Other team members include Ruben Cu:k Ba’ak (Tohono O’odham) serving as Community Engagement Coordinator, Kai-Se’ Toledo (Diné/Navajo Nation) as Lab Manager, to include 1 PhD student and 4+ undergraduate researchers. Other affiliations at ASU include the Center for Biology and Society, the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center.
The central aims of the Tsosie Lab are to advance genomic data, bioethics, Indigenous community engagement, policy and governance, and digital tools and computational approaches in the areas of human health, health inequities, paleogenomics and Ancestor health studies, conservation biology, biobanking, population genetics, genetic epidemiology, and using artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to expand Indigenous data sovereignty and community data governance standards.
Tsosie Lab is both a computational/dry and wet lab (1650 square feet) C-wing of the Life Sciences complex on the ASU Tempe campus. Unique to this space includes a centrally located community engagement and video conferencing suite. The renovated wet lab space, Biosafety Level 2, will include a new tissue culture room that is certified for CRISPR-Cas9/gene-editing research.
This lab team also works in close association with the Native BioData Consortium, an internationally renowned Indigenous-led biological and data repository to expand -omics (genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics) research, which Dr. Tsosie co-founded with other Indigenous geneticists and Tribal community members. Tsosie also co-leads IndigiData, an Indigenous data science summer education workshop (co-sponsored with support by KE). Tsosie is also on the Board of Directors for the American Society of Human Genetics, as well on international and national committees on ethical, legal, social implications to include the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Earth BioGenome Project (of which ASU is the global Secretariat), and many others.