Johri Lab | Population Genetics

Welcome! We are located on the 3rd floor of the Genome Sciences Building at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

The lab is currently funded by the NIH (NIGMS R35) and we are actively looking to hire both postdoctoral scholars and graduate students. More information is available here.

Our research interests broadly span population genetics, statistical inference, and evolutionary genomics. We are interested in how nonadaptive evolutionary processes like changes in population size, recombination, mutation, direct and indirect effects of negative selection and factors such as genome architecture jointly shape patterns of genomic variation. Work in the lab involves employing computational and theoretical approaches, developing statistical methods, or using an empirical approach to perform evolutionary inference and ask fundamental questions in population genetics. To learn more, please check our Research page. Here are some questions that we are interested in:

How much do adaptive vs. non-adaptive evolutionary processes contribute to genome-wide patterns of variation?
How does selection against deleterious mutations shape variation at linked sites?
What does the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations look like? How can we infer its shape from population-genetic data?
What are the selective forces acting on other types of mutations like gene duplicates?
How can we construct evolutionary baseline models of human pathogens?

NEWS

Nov 14, 2024 Austin's paper was accepted at Evolution! Congratulations Austin!

Nov 01, 2024 Sol Sloat has joined our lab! Welcome Sol!

Jun 24, 2024 Parul was awarded the Early Career Excellence Award by the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. Thanks so much - the award committee, Parul's mentors and collaborators, and everyone in the lab!

Jun 11, 2024 Jacob's paper was accepted at MBE! Congratulations Jacob!

Apr 26, 2024 Jacob has a new preprint! We investigate how ARG-based methods to infer population history might be biased in human and drosophila populations experiencing realistic levels of selection. Read it here.

Mar 10, 2024 Austin's poster was selected for an Honorable Mention at TAGC 2024! Congratulations Austin!

Mar 06, 2024 The Lab is heading to The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC) and excited to present posters in the Population Evolutionary and Quantitative Genetics (PEQG) sessions.

Mar 01, 2024 Jacob is giving a talk about his recent findings on ARG-based demographic inference at Lunch Bunch in the Biology department at UNC!

Feb 26, 2024 Sachin is giving a talk about his work on the probability of fixation in nonequilibrium populations in the Theoretical Ecology and Evolution seminar series at UNC!

Feb 08, 2024 Austin has a new preprint (our lab's first)! We investigate the accuracy of inference of the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations in partially selfing populations. Read it here!

July 19, 2023 Sachin Kaushik has joined our lab! Welcome Sachin!

Jun 19, 2023 Austin will be giving a talk at Evolution on Sunday, June 25th, in the symposium entitled "Population Genetics Theory / Methods IV".

Jun 12, 2023 Austin passed his qualifying exams with flying colors!!! Congratulations Austin!

May 15, 2023 Jacob Marsh has joined us in Chapel Hill! Welcome Jacob!

May 08, 2023 Austin Daigle has officially joined the lab! Welcome Austin!

Apr 17, 2023 Parul gave a talk at the workshop entitled "Biological evolution across scales: mathematical modelling and statistical inference", organized by EPFL. We thank the organizers for the invitation!

Mar 08, 2023 Parul gave a talk at the PopSim satellite meeting held at CSHL. We thank the

organizers for the fantastic conference and the invitation!

Jan 31, 2023 We are very excited to welcome the first rotation student, Austin Daigle, to the lab!

Jan 03, 2023 Officially the first day of the lab!