Jazlyn Mooney (she/her)

Jazlyn is a Gabilan Assistant Professor in the Quantitative and Computational Biology (QCB) Department within the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at USC. Her research combines computational approaches with population genetics theory to better understand genetic variation, medical genetics, and human evolution. CV

Jazlyn completed her undergraduate degree at the University of New Mexico studying human evolution with Jeffrey Long in Anthropology. She completed her PhD in Human Genetics at UCLA in 2020 under the advisement of Kirk Lohmueller, studying genetic variation in admixed populations, complex traits in dogs, and conservation genomics. Afterward, she moved to Stanford's Biology department for postdoctoral research with Noah Rosenberg, where she continued to study admixed populations with a focus on inference method development.

Hayden Davis (he/him)

Hayden recently completed a joint postdoctoral appointment at the University of Washington and NOAA, where he studied the genetic basis of disease resistance and life-history traits in salmonids and developed computational approaches for modeling temporal effective population size. He completed his PhD at the University of Washington, using population genetics and phylogenetic methods to investigate gene flow, species boundaries, and population structure in non-model species. Currently, he is working on inferring the demography of Channel Island foxes using ancestral recombination graphs.

Matt Beaumont (he/him)

Matt completed his MSc in Biotechnology at Nottingham Trent University and his PhD at the Institute of Population Genetics at Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien, where he studied transposable elements and their invasion dynamics in Drosophila. He specializes in pipeline development and bridging the gap between experimental and computational biology. Matt is interested in better understanding complex non-additive trait architecture in human genetics.

Shirin Nataneli (she/her)

Shirin is broadly interested in population genetics and evolution. Currently, she is exploring how we can better model complex admixture scenarios and infer demography using local ancestry information.

Aydin Loid Karatas (he/him)

Aydin is excited about the intersection of modeling human disease and large-scale simulation frameworks. His work addresses how admixture affects the distribution of identity-by-descent segments, and he is building a detailed demographic model of admixed populations from North America.

Shengmiao (Morgan) Huang (she/her)

Shengmiao is interested in developing mathematical models for conservation biology. Her work focuses on extending mathematical models to better understand the genealogical and demographic history of admixed populations.

Tessa Ferrari (she/her)

Tessa graduated from the Quantitative Biology undergraduate program, had a stint as our lab Research Technician, and is now in our CBB PhD program. She is interested in building and using large-scale simulation frameworks to infer demography, and developing methods to quantify recessive mutational load while controlling for structure.

Matthew Genchev

Matthew was an undergraduate in the Quantitative Biology program with an interest in modeling recombination and demography in non-human populations. He is currently reconstructing the demographic history of Channel Island foxes. Matthew was a Provost Undergraduate Research Fellow, SURF, and URAP Fellow.

Tina Lasisi (she/her)

Tina's background and interests fall within Biological Anthropology and complex trait genetics, specifically the evolution of human variation in pigmentation and scalp hair. Check out her website and PBS mini-series Why Am I Like This?

Maria Akopyan (she/her)

Maria completed her PhD at Cornell studying gene flow and adaptation in Atlantic silversides. While in our group, she explored how reference bias affects demographic inference in Canidae using whole genome sequence data from Mainland foxes. She was also an NSF PRFB postdoc in the Samuk and Armstrong labs at UCR.

Mengdi (Kim) Chai

Mengdi graduated with honors from the Quantitative Biology program. As a WiSE Undergraduate Fellow, she used identity-by-descent segments to identify genes associated with coat color in tigers and track their ancestral origins.

Anika Shrivastava

Anika worked on quantifying regions of the genome that harbor potential recessive lethal mutations by layering information from multiple types of genomic annotations. She was a Provost Undergraduate Research Fellow.

Chenyang (Julie) Li

Julie created the population assignment algorithm for mPCRselect. She was a WiSE Undergraduate Fellow, graduated with honors, and received the USC Discovery Scholar Distinction.

Mahija Mogalipuvvu

Mahija co-led our QBIO 490 section on Multi-Omic Data Analysis. In the lab, she worked on better understanding the allele frequency spectra of cancer-associated variants.

Peyton Hall

Peyton's project layered information from multiple types of genomic annotations to explore whether there were differences in annotation distributions across ancestries, extending our work on captive tigers.

Joseph Caluya

Joseph worked on data from TCGA, seeking to understand shared and population-specific differential expression in variants associated with breast cancer.

Aiko Abo Dominguez

Co-advised with Dr. Regina Wetzer at LA NHM, Aiko studied the Los Angeles population of Ligia using macroevolutionary and population genetic analyses. She was a URAP Fellow and recipient of both the NSF GRFP and a Fulbright Research Award in Argentina.

Sydney Bruce

Sydney worked on creating a recombination map for captive tigers in North America. She was a WiSE Undergraduate Fellow and a URAP Fellow.

Bruk Tefera

Bruk is interested in bioinformatics, cancer genomics, and machine learning.