Congratulations Dr. Harris!

Congratulations to Dr. Mariana Harris for her successful PhD defense! In her highly productive PhD, Mariana wrote a number of papers on the mode and tempo of natural selection in Drosophila and ancient humans. In her first two papers, Harris et al. 2023 MBE and Harris et al. 2024 Genetics, Mariana showed that the X chromosome harbors more hard sweeps than autosomes in multiple species of Drosophila. In her latter two papers, she showed that hard selective sweeps are common in modern and ancient humans and that sweeps were both lost and persisted in the face of human admixture (Pandey*, Harris* et al. 2024 Nature Communications; Harris et al. 2025 bioRxiv). We are really excited for her next steps!