Tsosie co-leads a study that investigates genetic determinants of
pre-eclampsia, specifically in pregnant
Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa women and collaborates with the tribal-research review board. Tsosie's team hopes that examining potential environmental and sociocultural factors will help these specific Native women in decreasing such high rates specific to their tribe. She has also focused on researching
uterine fibroids in black women using genetic information. Tsosie "advocates strongly for genomic and data sovereignty." as stated by the
American Indian Science and Engineering Society.
Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of nations to govern the collection, ownership, and application of their own data, in contrast to the ways in which researchers take and use Indigenous data without permission and disregarding that Nation's traditions. Tsosie's work as an advocate for Indigenous data sovereignty has included aiding a Tribal nation in the creation of their own policies for data privacy, bio-banking, and building research space for protecting the tribe's interests. She works with a variety of other Indigenous data and genetics organizations, including the Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics (SING), which consists of an international set of workshops in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Canada and the United States to build capacity in the fields of genetics and genomics among
Indigenous peoples. Based upon the results of its workshop projects, the SING Consortium published a framework to enhance ethical genomics research with Indigenous communities. Tsosie is also an organizer of and faculty for Indigidata, a week-long workshop that introduces tribal undergraduate and graduate students to data science and informatics skills. In 2022-2023, Tsosie was a Global Chair of ENRICH, a "four year program designed to create an integrated international network of Indigenous and allied scholars working in Indigenous data sovereignty and governance across a variety of disciplines including law, public health, policy, and genomic sciences." This position includes a one-month residency at
New York University. In 2023, Tsosie became an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences at The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the first Indigenous human geneticist at ASU.
Activism Tsosie has spoken out about the controversy of
Senator Elizabeth Warren's genetic testing. She has defended
Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous cultural and political identities that she feels could be threatened when non-Natives use DNA testing in an effort to discover if they have any genetic markers that commercial DNA companies label as "Native American", leading these non-Natives to self-identify as Indigenous people. Tsosie also advocates for the "decolonization of DNA" and the acknowledgement that a variety of social, cultural, and colonial factors impact health and are also conflated with genetics. ==References==