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.
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.
Michael Wasney
Michael is a Human Genetics PhD student. He is interested in understanding the ecological and evolutionary forces governing strain colonization dynamics. He recently completed his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in Biology and English.
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.
Peter Laurin
Undergraduate Researchers
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.
Rahul Natarajan
Nada AbouHaiba
Henry Krasner
Former Lab Members
