Participants

Dr. Bolotin develops and executes computational pipelines for the Livnat lab’s ultra-high resolution studies of de novo mutation origination rates as well as applies bioinformatics tools and develops scripts to analyze publicly available datasets in order to conducts a host of studies on the fundamental nature of mutation, including research on structural variation in the human and primate genomes to test predictions of interaction-based evolution. Dr. Bolotin received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from the Israel Institute of Technology, the Technion, and then continued to a direct PhD track in computational evolutionary genomics with Prof. Ruth Hershberg at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion. Following Ph.D., he joined the Livnat lab as a postdoctoral researcher.

Christi is from Long Island, New York where she attended SUNY Stony Brook to receive her Bachelors of Science in biology with a focus on developmental genetics in 2017. During her time at Stony Brook she taught general chemistry and several genetics courses while working in the Colognato lab, managing their mouse colony. She started the University Program in Genetics and Genomics at Duke University in 2019 where she joined Craig Lowe’s lab in the Molecular Genetics and Microbiology Department. In the Lowe Lab Christi works on understanding the genetic mechanism of vertebrate evolution with a particular interest in finding when certain non-coding sequences arose and how they contributed to modern bird features. This application is particularly interesting because Christi has developed a method of examining these sequences in the Japanese Quail system.

Dr. Fink Barkai is responsible for executing multistage experimental protocols developed in the Livnat lab to study de novo mutation rates at an ultra-high resolution and produce novel empirical information on the nature of mutation and mutation-rate variation in the human genome, and for coordinating research activities in the lab. She received her undergraduate degree cum laude at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, her Masters in Cancer Regulation at the Faculty of Biology at the Israel Institute of Technology, the Technion, and her Ph.D. in Cancer Research and Vascular Biology at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion. Prior to joining the Livnat lab, she worked in the Pharmacogenetics laboratory at the Rambam Health Care tertiary hospital in Israel in the development of clinical tests for personalized medicine with an emphasis on chemotherapeutic drugs.

John Fricks is a mathematical biologist who uses tools from probability and statistics to study biological dynamics. He has done significant work on stochastic models of molecular motors, including creating statistical methods to better understand time series emerging from nano-scale experiments on these motors. In addition, he has worked on stochastic models and inference for disease dynamics both at the cellular and populations levels, including studies of RSV and measles.

Adi Livnat is an Associate Professor in Evolutionary and Environmental Biology and the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa in Israel. He is interested in the fundamental question of how evolution happens. He has developed a theoretical account - Interaction-Based Evolution - which argues that the mutations driving adaptive evolution can be neither random nor Lamarckian: they can respond in general not to information that comes directly from the immediate environment (as in Lamarckism) but to information that has accumulated in the germline genome as a result of evolution. Thus, evolution results from co-evolving interactions of mutation-specific probabilities of origination and selection. One empirical prediction of this account is that mutation-specific rates can come to respond to specific selection pressures following multiple generations under selection. The Livnat Lab has developed a variety of novel genomic methods to test these predictions across loci and organisms.

Craig's background is diverse in that he has significant training in both computational genomics and developmental genetics. His undergraduate education is in computer science, with a focus on machine learning. For his graduate degree, he worked to apply his computational skills to the analysis of some of the first vertebrate genomes. For his postdoctoral studies, he focused on developmental genetics so that he could perform experiments at the bench to test his computational predictions. In his own lab, he mixes computational genomics and experimental genetics to establish a virtuous cycle. The computational predictions define a set of promising candidates for wet-lab experiments. The wet-lab experiments then either support or disprove the computational predictions, which allows his group to then improve the computational model. This diverse background has allowed him to create an interdisciplinary environment where his lab has had students with backgrounds in mathematics, neuroscience, developmental biology, and genetics.

Riley is a Ph.D. Candidate in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology who specializes in evolutionary biology, comparative and population genomics, and developmental neuroscience. His research focus is in uncovering how genetic changes specific to the human lineage have influenced neurodevelopmental programs that have enabled the emergence of human-specific morphological and behavioral traits.

Dr. Melamed is the manager of the Livnat lab. He spearheads the design of novel techniques and their application to the study of mutational and recombinational mechanisms in the Livnat lab and helps to supervise research projects on the fundamental nature of mutation. He earned his undergraduate degree in Biology magna cum laude and his Masters in Cell Research and Immunology summa cum laude at Tel Aviv University, studying the effects of mutations on viral assembly and release from cells in the human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1). He received his Ph.D. at the Israel Institute of Technology, the Technion, studying mRNA translation regulation. Following Ph.D. and prior to joining the Livnat lab, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Fellow at the University of Washington at Seattle in the lab of Stanley Fields, where he honed his expertise on molecular biological methods development with an emphasis on large-scale sequencing and mutagenesis studies.