Population Genetics
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC
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:
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How much do adaptive vs. non-adaptive evolutionary processes contribute to genome-wide patterns of variation?
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How does selection against deleterious mutations shape variation at linked sites?
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What does the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations look like? How can we infer its shape from population-genetic data?
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What are the selective forces acting on other types of mutations like gene duplicates?
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How can we construct evolutionary baseline models of human pathogens?
NEWS
Oct 02, 2026 Cobi, Ronald, and I talked about our ongoing work on malaria population genetics at the Carolina Malaria Meeting (CaMRAS).
Sep 29, 2026 We have a new preprint! We built a new coalescent-based model of within- and between-host evolution. Read it here. Congratulations to James for leading this work, and thanks to our collaborator Alex McAvoy for working with us!
Mar 06, 2026 We have a new tool to calculate expected nucleotide site diversity with background selection! Use any annotation file and recombination map to generate a map of background selection across your genome, using Bvalcalc. Read our preprint here. Congratulations Jacob!
Mar 03, 2026 We infer the fitness effects of new mutations in regulatory regions of the D. melanogaster genome and find an abundance of weakly deleterious effects. Read it here! Congratulations Austin!
Feb 27, 2026 We measured selection coefficients in malaria populations in Peru using simulations and modeling. Read it here. Congratulations Cobi! Thanks to our collaborators, Isabela Gyuricza and Jonathan Parr from UNC!
Jan 08, 2026 We have a new paper about the rights and wrongs of rescaling in population genetics simulations. Read it here. This work was in collaboration with Fanny Pouyet and Brian Charlesworth.
Dec 23, 2025 We have a new preprint! We have written a perspective on how to best build an evolutionary baseline model in the deadliest malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, for population genomic inference. Read it here. Congratulations, Jacob, Austin, James, and especially Cobi, for leading it!
Jun 06, 2025 The Johri Lab has received seed funding from the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC to develop an evolutionary baseline model for population genomic inference in the malaria parasite. Read about it here. Thanks so much UNC!