Omer received his Ph.D. at University of Pennsylvania under Dr. Theodore Schurr and studied with Dr. Charles Lee at Harvard Medical School in Harvard Medical School before establishing the laboratory. He is interested all things evolution and anthropology.

Charikleia received her PhD from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, studying polymorphic inversions in Drosophila subobscura. She is particularly interested in genome structure evolution and the mechanisms underlying structural variant formation. She aspires to identify and characterize structurally complex regions genome-wide across different primates.

Petar’s work is tied to understanding how novel structural variants, “variable number tandem repeats” in particular, can create/change gene function. He is generally curious on how common structural variants contribute to evolution and disease susceptibility. Read More

Alber received his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is interested in the evolution of structural variants in humans.

Kendra graduate from the University of California, San Diego with a dual degrees in Anthropology with a concentration in Archaeology and Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution along with a minor in Chinese Studies. She is primarily interested in diet related gene by environment interactions across human populations. Her current work involves describing the copy number variation of salivary amylase, a starch digesting enzyme, across human populations.

Luane has a B.Sc. in Biology (2020) and a Ms. in Genetics and Evolution (2022) from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil. She is now a second year Ph.D. student interested on the evolution of gene expression. Particularly, she works with sex-specific and and strain-specific gene expression evolution in salivary glands of mice.

Lindsey is a sophomore majoring in Biomedical Sciences who is working with salivary samples of humans and the digital PCR to determine the copy number variation of AMY1 in Andean populations.

Sarah is working on bioinformatically annotating variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) copy number variation in mucin genes across different primate species. Her efforts are leading to understanding how these mucus-making genes evolve in the primate lineage. In parallel, Sarah is conducting ddPCR experiments to estimate copy numbers of certain genes, and is also training in Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing techniques.