Can you tell us about your research? What were you working on as a fellow, and how has it progressed since completing the fellowship? My research in Dr. Dmitri Petrov’s lab as a graduate student was on understanding the rapidity of adaptation in natural populations of Drosophila melanogaster. Adaptation is a process whereby a population evolves to become more fit. In Drosophila, there are some well documented cases of adaptation at loci that confer resistance to pesticides and viruses. Discovery of additional important cases of adaptation via genomic scans can unlock insights into loci that ma ..read more

On February 28, 2024, Francois Bienvenu and Mia Miyagi presented on models that have been relevant to their respective research areas. Francois Bienvenu from Laboratoire de Mathématiques de Besançon began with his presentation: “Where do phylogenetic trees come from?” Starting by drawing a basic phylogenetic tree, Bienvenu noted that it is a good structure to illustrate a hierarchy. Labeling the lower leaves gives you a set of nested groups. When naturalists started trying to describe and categorize living organisms, they found that they tended to fit nicely on such trees. They interpreted the ..read more

On February 20, 2024, John Wakeley and Sally Otto spoke with Montgomery Slatkin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, on how the field of modeling has developed over the years. The following is a summary of their conversation, minimally paraphrased and edited for clarity. Otto: When was your first inkling that math had something to contribute to biology? Slatkin: When I was a graduate student, I was asked to be a teaching assistant in a course called Mathematical Modeling, taught by my advisor George Carrier and Bill Bossert. Ma ..read more

For the second installment of the Modeling & Theory in Population Biology series on January 17, 2024, Bruce Weir presented his talk on applications for population genetics in forensics. He opened with a recent homicide case as an example, in which DNA from the involved weapon’s trigger matched the DNA profile of a person of interest. The approximate incidence of this profile was 1 in 1 trillion Caucasians, 1 in 19 trillion African Americans and 1 in 2.6 billion Hispanics. He went on to explain where these numbers come from, and how to make sense of them. He displayed the data used by the f ..read more

The January 11, 2024 kickoff event of the Modeling & Theory in Population Biology series featured four speakers: Maria Servedio from the University of North Carolina, Marc Feldman from Stanford, Joel E. Cohen from Rockefeller University, and Tanja Stadler from ETH Zürich. This group of speakers reflected the initial inspiration for this program: how diverse problems within the field of population biology can be investigated using some of the same techniques. Our discussion spanned evolution to epidemiology and beyond. Plus, this event provided a unique platform for speakers to get into the ..read more

Nicolas Alcala was a 2014-15 fellow who has gone on to become a computational biologist for the World Health Organization, focusing on multi-omic integration and cancer evolution for the Rare Cancers Genomics Initiative. How did you first get involved with the center? What was your original focus as a fellow, and how did it evolve throughout the fellowship? I learnt about CEHG during my last year of PhD. I was in Switzerland at that time, I loved Noah Rosenberg’s work in statistical population genetics and wanted to join his lab. My plan was to apply to the Swiss National Science Foundation po ..read more

Clare’s fellowship in 2020 was a crucial step in her unusual career journey from journalist to biologist. Read on to learn about the inspiration behind her research! Can you tell us about your research? What were you working on as a fellow, and how has it progressed since completing the fellowship? I study evolution in fluctuating environments using a model Saccharomyces cerevisiae system, where we grow baker’s yeast in liquid media for 48-hour cycles and then dilute the culture into fresh media. Together with my postdoctoral advisor Dmitri Petrov and graduate student Shaili Mathur, we have fo ..read more

Alana Papula is a member of our most recent cohort of CEHG fellows, studying evolution of bacterial populations in the Fisher lab. Read on for a peek into her experience during the fellowship! Can you tell us about your research? What were you working on as a fellow, and how has it progressed since completing the fellowship? What does it mean to be a bacterial species? How is within-species diversity generated and maintained in bacterial populations? These fundamental questions have remained controversial in microbiology. My research explores these questions in the context of a clade of the ma ..read more

A recent publication in eLife captures a sequencing project led by the Pritchard lab, in which thousands of genomes were analyzed to reveal how and where people moved during the Roman Empire. Lead authors Margaret Antonio and Clemens Weiss gave us a look behind the scenes of this paper coming to be. How did your group decide upon this topic?  Antonio: The Pritchard Lab is broadly interested in human population genetics and complex traits. (Just before I joined the lab) Ron Pinhasi’s lab (University of Vienna) was interested in understanding the evolution of human traits (e.g. lactase pers ..read more

Yuping Li is a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Stanford. She is co-advised by Professors Gavin Sherlock and Dmitri Petrov. Her Ph.D. work has been focusing on combining a DNA-barcode lineage tracking system in S. cerevisiae and experimental evolution to understand short-term adaptation and trade-offs. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, personally and professionally? This is Yuping. I am a graduate student in the Department of Biology, jointly advised by Professors Gavin Sherlock and Dmitri Petrov. I grew up in a small village in northern China, where the concept of researc ..read more