Desai Lab

	Michael Desai Principal Investigator
	Jenn Thomson Administrative Assistant Jenn keeps the lab running.
	Gabriel Perron Postdoctoral Fellow Website Gabriel received his B. Sc. in 2004 and his M. Sc. in 2006 from McGill, where he worked with Graham Bell. He moved to the University of Oxford, where he worked with Angus Buckling, and received his D. Phil. in 2010. He then worked with Timothy Barraclough as a visiting fellow at Imperial College London before joining the Desai lab in September of 2010. Gabriel's research focuses on adaptive dynamics and experimental evolutionary ecology, with a special interest in applications to infectious diseases. Using a combination of different experimental models and theory along with medical and veterinary data, he studies the effect of public health interventions and treatment context on the evolution of medically important traits, such as antimicrobial resistance and virulence.
	Sergey Kryazhimskiy Postdoctoral Fellow Sergey received his B.A. in Mathematical Physics from Moscow State University in 2003, working with Valetin Butuzov. He did his graduate work with Simon Levin at Princeton University, and received his Ph. D. in 2008. He then moved to Penn as a postdoctoral fellow with Joshua Plotkin, before joining the Desai lab in September 2010. He is broadly interested in understanding how microbes evolve. This includes analysis of sequence data from viral populations in nature, theoretical investigations in population genetics and in the theory of adaptation, as well as, more recently, experimental evolution in yeast.
	Lucy Colwell Postdoctoral Fellow Lucy received her B. A. from the University of Cambridge in 2004. She did her graduate work with Michael Brenner at Harvard, receiving her Ph.D. in 2010. She is interested in protein evolution, correlated mutations, and related problems in population genetics.
	Michael McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow Mike received his B.S. in Genetics from the University of Otago in 2001, and his MSc from the University of Otago in 2003. He began his Doctoral work with Paul Rainey in 2005, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Auckland and Massey University in November 2009. He did an initial postdoc with Jun-Yi Leu at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and joined the Desai Lab in April 2012. Mike's research focuses upon the role of mutation in evolutionary processes, such as the evolution and consequences of the mutator phenotype, the effects of DNA sequence context upon mutation rates, the distribution of the fitness effects of mutations, and the influence of mutation and genetic architecture upon evolutionary trajectories.
	J. David van Dyken Postdoctoral Fellow
	Sebastian Akle Graduate student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Sebastian received his B. A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. He is interested in using experimental evolution to study the interplay between standing variation and new mutations in adapting populations.
	Lauren Nicolaisen Graduate student in Physics Lauren received her B. S. from UCLA in 2007. She is working on methods to incorporate natural selection into genealogical approaches in theoretical population genetics.
	Dan Rice Graduate student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Dan received his B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale in 2010. At Yale, he worked with Jeff Townsend on the evolution of quantitative traits. He devised a test for directional selection on quantitative traits based on QTL effect size distributions. In the Desai Lab, he is using experimental evolution to explore mutation-selection balance in yeast.
	Elizabeth Jerison Graduate student in Physics Elizabeth received her B. A. from Yale in 2010. She is interested in selection in theoretical population genetics and experimental evolution to probe the structure of pleiotropy.
	Ben Good Graduate student in Physics Ben received his B.S. from Swarthmore in 2010. He is working on theoretical population genetics and evolutionary dynamics.
	Evgeni Frenkel Graduate Student in Biophysics Genya received his B.A. from Princeton in 2010. He is working on experimental evolution in yeast, particular the spontaneous evolution of frequency dependent selection.
	Katya Kosheleva Rotation Student in Physics Katya received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 2011. She is working on experimental evolution in yeast.
	Lab Alumni Henry Shull Undergraduate, Harvard College