PEOPLE

Principal Investigator

Nandita Garud

Nandita is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Human Genetics , a Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator, and NSF CAREER recipient. She is interested in understanding how natural populations evolve, with a focus on the human gut microbiome and Drosophila melanogaster.

CV, Google Scholar

Email: ngarud at ucla dot edu

Postdoctoral Scholar

Maya Weissman

Maya completed her PhD at Brown University in Dr. Dan Weinreich’s lab in 2024. Her thesis was on quantifying bet hedging in diverse organisms. She is interested in understanding the genomic signatures associated with different modalities of selection, including epistasis.

Email: mweissman97 at gmail dot com

Graduate Students

Jon Mah

Jonathan Mah is a PhD student in the Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Program. Jon graduated from the University of Washington with a B.S. in Biochemistry and Microbiology, where he studied quantitative models for protein evolution in RNA viruses. He recently published a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution on the demographic histories and selective effects of ~40 gut commensal species.

Email: jonmah at ucla dot edu

Michael Wasney

Michael is a Human Genetics PhD student. He is interested in understanding the ecological and evolutionary forces governing strain colonization dynamics. Recently, he wrote a paper showing that bacterial genetic diversity is uniform along the gut. He completed his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in Biology and English.

Email: michaelwasney at ucla dot edu

Aina Martinez Zurita

Aina is a PhD student in Human Genetics. She is interested in understanding how repeatable and rapid evolution is in the human gut microbiome. She recently graduated with a B.S. from MIT and worked at the Broad Institute prior to joining us at UCLA. She recently wrote a paper with co-advisor Kirk Lohmueller on the effects of linked selection on the inference of the DFE.

Email: amzurita at ucla dot edu

Peter Laurin

Peter Laurin is a PhD student in Ecology and Evolution and is interested in population genetics and microbial evolution. He graduated with a BS in Ecology and Evolution and an MS in Statistics from the University of Chicago, where he worked on pathogen evolution and the development of genome-wide association statistics in the laboratory of Joy Bergelson. He is interested in how bacteria adapt to live in microbial communities and transmit between hosts, and how selective pressures in the microbiome can exert an influence on microbial life history.

Email: peterlaurin at ucla dot edu

Aditya Iyer

Aditya (Adi) is a PhD student in the Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Program. He is interested in understanding the dynamics of microbial evolution. He completed his undergraduate studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he double-majored in computer science and biostatistics

Email:aiyer24 at g dot ucla dot edu

Adam Park

Adam recently completed his masters in mathematics and computer science at Penn State University and is a Simons Fellowship finalist. He is interested in quantifying the dynamics of the spread of microbial adaptations from person to person.

Email: adampark at ucla dot edu.

Undergraduate Researchers

Alexandria Hunt

Alexandria is an undergraduate at UCLA majoring in computational and systems biology. She is interested in understanding the dynamics of horizontal gene transfer in the gut microbiome.

Rahul Natarajan

Rahul Natarajan is an MS student at Columbia in Computer Science. He recently completed his B.S. at UCLA in Mathematics and Computer Science. He is interested in leveraging big data and various computational methods to improve healthcare systems. In his free time, Rahul enjoys playing and watching soccer.

Brendan Aeria

Brendan Aeria is an undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in Computational and Systems Biology (Class of 2028). He is interested in applying machine learning to understand the nature of genomes and evolutionary dynamics. Brendan leads a machine learning in science reading group for ACM AI. In his free time, he enjoys programming video games and going for runs.

Former Lab Members

Leah Briscoe

Leah was a NSF GRFP funded PhD student in the Bioinformatics program working on statistical methods for the analysis of population level microbiome data. She completed her PhD in 2024 from UCLA . She is currently a scientist at Baylor.

Daisy Chen

Daisy recently graduated from UCLA with majors in Computer Science and Computational and Systems Biology. She is currently a PhD student at UCSD. She is broadly interested in the use of big data to understand complex biological systems. She recently published a paper on the evolutionary dynamics of the infant gut microbiome in Genome Research.

Mariana Harris

Mariana Harris is currently working at Natera. She graduated from UCLA in 2025 from the Biomathematics PhD program and completed her B.S. in Applied Mathematics at Instituto Técnologico Autónomo de México (ITAM). Her dissertation was on developing statistical methods to detect selection in Drosophila and ancient humans. During her time in the Garud Lab, she wrote papers on the enrichment of hard sweeps on the X chromosome (here and here) and selective sweeps in aDNA.

Email: mharris94 at ucla dot edu

Ricky Wolff

Ricky Wolf Ricky Wolff is currently a postdoc at UCSD. He graduated from UCLA with a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Before coming to UCLA, he completed his B.A. in mathematics at Columbia. In the Garud Lab, Ricky worked on detecting selective sweeps across human gut microbiomes and among other projects the stability of strains within healthy hosts among other projects.

Email: rwolff at ucsd dot edu