Current Lab Members

Molly Przeworski

Professor

mp3284 at columbia.edu

Molly received a B.A. in Mathematics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. Her postdoc was in the Statistics Dept. of the University of Oxford, and was followed by a two year stint as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Before moving to Columbia University in 2013, she was a faculty member at the University of Chicago (where she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist) as well as, briefly, at Brown University.

db3626 at columbia.edu

Daria graduated from Moscow State University with a joint undergraduate and master’s degree in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics. During her master’s, she studied the evolution of drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. She is currently a PhD student in the Biological Sciences program, co-mentored by Professor Peter Andolfatto. She is interested in interactions between species and the genetics of adaptation.

vg2521 at columbia.edu

Vanesa completed her BS in Computer Science – Bioinformatics at Ramapo College of NJ. At Ramapo, she studied the association of cis-regulatory g-quadruplex motifs with splice sites in the human genome. During her undergrad, she also conducted computational biology research for the Genome Open-source Breeding Informatics Initiative and in Dr. Iman Hajirasouliha’s lab. She is a PhD student in the Biological Sciences program, interested in developing and applying statistical methods to study germline mutation.

ak4890 at columbia.edu

Arjun studied Computer Science with minors in Quantitative and Computational Biology and Linguistics at Princeton University as an undergraduate, after which he spent a year as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University. For his doctoral work, Arjun is working on the population genetics of corals. He is jointly mentored by Peter Andolfatto.

wm2377 at columbia.edu

Will graduated from Emory University with a degree in applied mathematics and biology. During his Ph.D. with Guy Sella, he modelled the evolution of mutation rates and the genetic basis of adaptation. Currently, he is investigating the mutagenic and evolutionary processes that shape genetic diversity among primates.

hmm2183 at columbia.edu

Hannah graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in Natural Sciences and an MSci in Systems Biology. During and after her master’s she worked on the evolutionary genomics of Lake Malawi cichlids in Richard Durbin’s group. She is a PhD student in the Biological Sciences doctoral program and is currently interested in the genetics of adaptation.

pp2876 at columbia.edu

Lin graduated with a BA in Computational Biology from Cornell University in 2023, where she was advised by Prof. Andy Clark. At Cornell, she worked on gene-environment interactions involving human complex traits. During her undergrad, she also worked with Prof. Iain Mathieson at the University of Pennsylvania to characterize the regulatory effects of recent natural selection using ancient DNA. Lin is a PhD student in the Biological Sciences program and is interested in complex traits and polygenic adaptation.

Graduate Student

ss6917 at columbia.edu

Matin graduated from Sharif University of Technology with a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering. During his studies, he was introduced to computational genomics, which led him to work in Dr. Magnus Nordborg’s lab. There, he developed a hidden Markov model for genotyping F2 individuals in a reference-free manner. He is currently a PhD student in the Biological Sciences department, focusing on human genomics.

Postdoctoral Researcher

avs2172 at columbia.edu

Anastasia did her PhD research in Skoltech, Moscow under the supervision of Georgii Bazykin and Alexey Kondrashov. Her current research focuses on the role of genetic interactions and the interplay of selection with mutation and recombination processes in shaping patterns of genetic variation.