PEOPLE
Principal Investigator
Nandita Garud
Nandita is an assistant professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at UCLA. She is interested in understanding how natural populations evolve and has been focusing on bacteria in the human microbiome and Drosophila melanogaster.
Nandita completed her M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Genetics at Stanford University in Dr. Dmitri Petrov’s lab where she developed a new statistical method to detect signatures of rapid adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster population genomic data. Nandita completed herpostdoctoral work at the Gladstone Institute at UCSF in Dr. Katie Pollard’s lab studying the evolution of bacteria in the human microbiome.
Email: ngarud at ucla dot edu.
Postdoctoral Scholars
William Shoemaker
Will is an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology who is working on statistical approaches to infer the distribution of fitness effects for mutations in the gut microbiome. He is broadly focused on examining the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of microorganisms through computational, empirical, and theoretical means. He completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in Dr. Jay T. Lennon’s lab, where he examined the ecology and evolution of energy-limited microbial populations.
Graduate Students
Leah Briscoe
Leah is an NSF GRFP PhD student in the Bioinformatics IDP working on statistical methods for the analysis of population level microbiome data. She completed her BS at UCLA in Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology with a minor in Bioinformatics. She is fascinated by the ways in which microbial communities aid and adapt to hosts, and how this community transforms through time.
Mariana Harris
Ricky Wolff
Ricky Wolff is a masters student in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. He is working on developing statistical methods and modeling tools to understand how inter-species interactions affect strain replacement in the gut microbiome. Before coming to UCLA, he completed his B.A. in mathematics at Columbia, working in cancer genomics after graduation. In his free time, he enjoys playing guitar and camping, and hopes to continue to study microbial ecology as a PhD.
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. His research interests lie at the intersection of population genetics, mathematical evolution, and microbiology.
Undergraduate Researchers
Daisy Chen
Daisy is an undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in Computer Science and Computational and Systems Biology. She is broadly interested in the use of big data to understand complex biological systems, and she is particularly concerned with issues of environmental sustainability. Daisy hopes to continue studying computational biology in graduate school.
Rahul Natarajan
