Congratulations to Rohan Mehta on his new job as Associate Professor of Biology at Elmhurst University! We’ll miss you!

Daniel has officially been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure!

Congratulations to Qihan Liu on defending his PhD thesis! Qihan will be joining Trexquant and making a lot more money than his adviser.

Congratulations to Brent Allman on defending his PhD thesis! Brent will be joining Claus Wilke’s lab as a postdoc and continuing his research on viral evolution. Daniel sadly had to attend virtually, but Brent’s other advisor Katia Koelle was there to host the in-person party.

Daniel has received an NSF CAREER award for ``Quantifying adaptation and recombination in pathogen populations’’. This 5-year grant will provide funding for us to study how to infer the fitness landscape and transmission patterns underlying the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern, and to quantify patterns of gene exchange in the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus using our collaborator Tim Read’s Staphopia database. It will also fund a new science club that we will start at the Global Village Project, a middle school serving refugee girls from around the world. If you’re interested in collaborating on any of these projects, please let us know!

Congratulations to Tyler Smith on defending his PhD thesis! Tyler will be taking his expertise on long-range dispersal and joining Boeing’s research department in August. Tyler defended over Zoom, but for the post-defense celebration we got together for our first in-person lab event since the pandemic!

Congratulations to lab member Brent Allman on winning the 2021 Berl Boykin Fierce Leadership Award for his outstanding contributions to the Emory LGBT community!

Daniel has been named a 2021 Sloan Research Fellow! We are very grateful for the honor and support. April Hunt has a very nice writeup of what this award means for the group. For more on the fellowships in general, see the Sloan Foundation’s press release.

Congratulations to lab member Brent Allman on being inducted into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society! The society is a national network of graduate students with outstanding scholarship and commitment to promoting diversity. As part of his membership, he will be participating in the national conference.

Congratulations to lab member Brent Allman on receiving the Kharen Fulton award for his leadership in promoting diversity, equity, inclusion!

Congratulations to Mahan Ghafari on defending his Master’s thesis! Mahan will be starting his DPhil in Interdisciplinary Bioscience at Oxford in the fall.

Congratulations to lab member Brent Allman on being named the PBEE student of the year!

Forget Simons Investigator – Daniel’s an official “Crumble Master” now. His “Hopeful Monsters” (whole-wheat chocolate chip cookies, mom’s recipe) have won the 2017 Biology Bakeoff!

Daniel has been named a Simons Investigator in the Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems! This means we have more money to hire postdocs with, so please get in touch if you’re interested.

Congratulations to the first alum from the group, Caroline Holmes! Caroline received her honors BS in Physics in May, and is headed to Princeton for grad school. She’s a star – co-first author on a groundbreaking paper and a McMullan Award winner. Look for more from her soon!

We’re growing! If you’re looking to do a PhD or postdoc in theoretical evolution/population biophysics, please send me an email. Or if you know someone who might be interested, please tell them to get in touch!