Jada Benn Torres is an Associate Professor and Director for the Genetic Anthropology and Biocultural Studies Laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. She earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 2006. She then completed a two-year postdoc in the Department of Medicine, Section of Genetic Medicine at the University of Chicago in Illinois. In 2008, Dr. Benn Torres accepted a faculty position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame then later joined the Anthropology faculty at Vanderbilt University in 2016.

Dr. Benn Torres’ primary research area is the Anglophone and Hispanic Caribbean where she explores population genetics of African and Indigenous Caribbean peoples. In addition, she publishes on the impacts of genetic technologies on contemporary populations with specific regard to issues of race and identity. As part of this research agenda, she collaborates with genetic epidemiologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians to examine various aspects of the medical and social meanings of genetic data as it pertains to biomedicine, race, and Caribbean history.