Molly Przeworski
Dept. of Human Genetics & Dept. of Ecology and Evolution
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist
Ziyue Gao
Graduate Student
Ziyue received a B.A. in Biology from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China (2010). She is currently a graduate student in the Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology program.Her research interests lie in modeling long-lived balancing selection and identifying targets in humans and other species.
Patricia Gonzalez
Research Specialist, working jointly with Marcelo Nobrega.
Patricia received her Bachelor and Master degrees in Biology at Complutense University in Madrid. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biology at the same university in 2008, focusing on the cytological and molecular characterization of two novel heterochromatic proteins in the diptera Sciara coprophila. During her postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago, she studied the biological role of laminins, major component of basement membranes, in epithelial morphogenesis and cell migration.
Amir Kermany
Postdoctoral Researcher
Amir holds a B.Sc. in Applied Physics (Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran), M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada) and a PhD in Mathematics (2010) (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada). Amir’s research is mainly focused on evolutionary consequences of recombination. During his past research appointment in the department of mathematics and statistics at the Université de Montréal, he approximated the probability of fixation of a new mutant under selection using the Ancestral Recombination-Selection Graph and studied the effect of recombination and epistasis on the rate of adaptation. Amir’s current research is focused on developing a new Bayesian method for analyzing human trisomy data and studying the recombination profile of trisomic chromosomes.
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) (where she was a Churchill scholar), and a Certificate in Chinese Language from Lanzhou University (2008). For her PhD, she worked on a range of topics, from the genetic basis of variation in human recombination to the determinants of diversity level differences among species. She is staying in the lab for six months as a postdoc, analyzing patterns of genetic variation in finches.
Marie Lopez
Marie is a Masters student in Genetics pursuing a European Magistere in Genetics at the University of Paris VII. She holds a BA in Genetics (2012), also from University of Paris VII, and is interested in human genetics, evolution and genomics. She is visiting the lab for six months.
Daniel Matute
Postdoctoral Researcher
Daniel obtained a dual degree in biology and microbiology at Universidad de Los Andes in Columbia (2005). He completed his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution with Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago in Spring 2010, focused on the genetic architecture of reproductive isolation in different species of Drosophila. His postdoctoral project is on the evolution of reproductive isolation via reinforcement.
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. Her previous work focused on detecting transmission distortion in the human genome. She is currently working with genome-wide sequencing data from two related lemur species in order to learn about how population sizes have changed over time, as well as to find genetic changes that may account for inter-species pigmentation differences. She is also broadly interested in applications of population genetics to non-model organisms, particularly the genetics of inter-species interactions and the evolution of reproductive isolation.
Keerthi Sannareddy
Programmer
Keerthi received her Bachelors degree in Biotechnology from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India (2009) and her Masters in Bioinformatics from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (2011). After graduating, she worked as a Research Associate for the Bioinformatics Core at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she focused on the analysis and interpretation of next generation sequencing data. She now works on studies of evolutionary genomics.
Laure Segurel
Postdoctoral Researcher
Laure received a Masters in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot (2006) and a PhD in Population Genetics with Evelyne Heyer and Renaud Vitalis at the National Museum of Natural History of Paris (2010). Her doctoral research focused on understanding the influence of lifestyle on demographic history, as well as on local adaptation of Central Asian human populations. She recently worked on the molecular evolution of PRDM9 in primates and its implications for the evolution of the fine-scale recombination landscape. Current work focuses on the evolution of the ABO blood group in primates and the analysis of shared selective pressures between humans and chimpanzees.
Sidi Zhang
Undergraduate Student
Sidi is a senior in the college, majoring in Biology and Statistics, who has been in the lab for almost two years. She will start a PhD program in Genetics at Harvard in the fall.