Participants

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.

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.