Ryan Hernandez

Post-doctoral researcher

Ryan obtained a B.A. with honors in mathematics from Pitzer College (Claremont, CA) in 2003, and completed his Ph.D. with Carlos Bustamante at Cornell University in January 2008. His research has focused on developing population genetic models of demography and selection to better understand modern day patterns of genetic variation. Ryan also has a keen interest in using detailed forward simulations to gain insight into complex biological phenomena. As of April Ryan will be Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

Joanna Kelley

Post-doctoral researcher

Joanna completed a dual degree in mathematics and biology at Brown University in 2003. She finished her Ph.D. in Genome Sciences with Willie Swanson at University of Washington in March 2008. Her research interests are focused around understanding positive selection in human populations. She is currently working on dating the age of selected alleles. Joanna is supported by an NRSA fellowship. Joanna's website

Kevin Bullaughey

Graduate student

Kevin was a double major in Computational Biology and Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania (2004). He then spent a year studying and traveling in China and Taiwan. He is the recipient of an NSF pre-doctoral fellowship, and is interested in the genetic architecture of gene expression as well as an assortment of other questions about natural selection and recombination.

Adi Fledel-Alon

Graduate student

Adi holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel (2001) and a Masters in Operations Research from Cornell University (2003). She worked as a programmer for Carlos D. Bustamante at Cornell for two years before joining the dept. Her research concentrates on the evolution of recombination rates in primates.

Ellen Leffler

Graduate student

Ellen has a B.A. in Biology from Amherst College (2006), an M.Phil. in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (2007), and a Certificate in Chinese Language from Lanzhou University (2008). She is interested in many topics in human and evolutionary genetics including recombination rates and patterns of genetic diversity.

Wynn Meyer

Graduate student

Wynn received a B.S. in Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology track, from Yale University (2004). She worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA and then as a technologist for the American Red Cross Molecular Lab in Philadelphia before coming to the University of Chicago. She is interested in a broad range of topics related to the effects of evolutionary forces on genomes and populations.

Cord Melton

Computer programmer

Cord Melton works as a computer programmer in the group. She is three courses shy of a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and is broadly interested in evolutionary mechanisms and building tools for genetics data analysis.

Daniel Wilson

Former post-doctoral researcher

Danny holds a B.A. in Biological Sciences and D.Phil. in Evolutionary Genetics from Oxford. His research interests centre on the application of population genetics tools to solving problems in human infectious diseases, and detecting the signature of natural selection within populations. His software omegaMap is designed to address that problem in recombining populations, and is available to download from Danny's website. As of January 2010, Danny has his own group in Oxford studying the evolution and epidemiology of human pathogens. If you are interested in a graduate student or post-doctoral position, get in touch.

Celine Becquet

Former graduate student

Now at the University of California, Berkeley. Celine's research interests focus on investigating computational methods to understand speciation. As an approach to this question, she developed the program MIMAR, which uses summaries of polymorphism data at multiple loci surveyed in a pair of diverging populations or closely related species and, in contrast to previous methods, allows for intralocus recombination. Celine's website

Susan Ptak

Former post-doc

Now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Susan's website

Kosuke Teshima

Former post-doc

Now at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Hayama, Japan. Kosuke's website