The Desai Lab

People

Michael Desai
Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Physics
mdesai [at] oeb.harvard.edu
Melinda Peterson
Administrative Assistant

Melinda keeps the lab running. You can find her at HUH 403, x68062.

mpeterson [at] fas.harvard.edu
Thomas Dupic
HFSP Postdoctoral Fellow

Thomas joined the Desai Lab in January 2020. He earned his Ph.D. at UPMC in Paris in theoretical physics then worked on computational immunology with Aleksandra Walczak and Thierry Mora. In the Desai Lab, Thomas is working on mapping the affinity landscape of in-vivo antibodies against various antigens and on understanding the theoretical basis for B-cells evolution.

dupic.thomas [at] gmail.com
Caroline Holmes
Postdoctoral Fellow

Caroline joined the Desai Lab in September 2023. She earned her Ph.D. in theoretical biophysics at Princeton, working with Bill Bialek. In the Desai Lab, Caroline is using a combination of experimental, theoretical, and computational methods to analyze the structure of high-dimensional genotype-phenotype maps.

carolineholmes [at] fas.harvard.edu
Shreyas Gopalakrishnan
Graduate Student in Molecules, Cells, and Organisms

Shreyas received his B. Sc. in biology from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 2018, and he joined the lab in 2019. He is using QTL mapping in budding yeast to understand the statistical structure of pleiotropy. He is also using long-term experimental evolution in different yeast species to quantify genetic parallelism across species.

sgopalakrishnan [at] g.harvard.edu
Alief Moulana
Graduate Student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Alief earned a BA in math and biology from Carleton College where they studied microbial evolution in the deep-sea hydrothermal vents before joining the lab in 2019. He is currently studying the co-evolution between viruses and immune cells, especially within the context of ever-changing molecular recognition landscapes.

amoulana [at] g.harvard.edu
Eliot Fenton
Graduate Student in Physics

Eliot received his B.S. in Physics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2018 and joined the lab in 2019. He uses a mix of experimental and computational techniques to study how factors such as sexual reproduction and gene networks impact the speed and trajectory of evolution.

eliotfenton [at] g.harvard.edu
Misha Gupta
Graduate Student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Misha joined the lab in 2020. She is developing quantitative genetics methods for trait mapping in budding yeast, and conducting experimental evolution to understand the role of spatial structure in promoting adaptation in inhomogeneous environments

mishagupta [at] g.harvard.edu
Jack Edwards
Graduate Student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Jack joined the lab in 2021. He is working on molecular barcoding methods in the E. coli long-term evolution experiment, and is also broadly interested in evolutionary theory.

jedwards1 [at] fas.harvard.edu
Berk Alpay
Graduate Student in Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology

Berk earned his degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Connecticut, joining the lab in 2022. He investigates directed evolution's traversal of genotype-phenotype maps, theoretically and using in vitro assays of antibody binding affinities.

berk_alpay [at] g.harvard.edu [website]
Alex Poret
Graduate Student in Biophysics

Alex joined the lab in 2023 after completing her B. Sc. in Biological Engineering from MIT in 2022. She is developing gene editing and barcoding systems to probe how epistasis constrains the trajectory of evolution in microorganisms.

aporet [at] g.harvard.edu
Jenya Belousova
Graduate Student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Jenya received her specialist degree in bioengineering and bioinformatics from Moscow State University in 2023 and then joined the lab. She is interested in fundamental evolutionary mechanisms and is studying them using artificial evolutionary experiments on yeast.

ebelousova [at] g.harvard.edu
Shreyas Pai
Graduate Student in Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology

Shreyas earned his BA in Natural Sciences (Zoology) at the University of Cambridge in 2022, and joined the lab in 2023. He is working on long term experimental evolution in yeast and E. coli, with a focus on evolutionary dynamics, coexistence, and diversification.

shreyaspai [at] g.harvard.edu
Caelan Brooks
Graduate Student in Physics

Caelan graduated from Kutztown University with a BS in Physics in 2021 and joined the lab in 2023. She develops theoretical models to understand underlying epistatic structure in genotype-phenotype maps and is interested in the dynamics of that structure under different environmental conditions.

caelanbrooks [at] g.harvard.edu

Lab Alumni

Artur Rego-Costa
Bioinformatics Scientist, Regeneron.

Gautam Reddy
Assistant Professor, Princeton.

Tanush Jagdish
Consultant, McKinsey.

Angela Phillips
Assistant Professor, University of California, San Francisco.

Jiseon Min
Postdoc, Kern Lab, University of Oregon

Katherine Lawrence
Scientist, Oxford Nanopore

Milo Johnson
Postdoc, Koskella lab, UC Berkeley.

Chris Bakerlee
Biosecurity.

Alex N. Nguyen Ba
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto.

Mark Margres
Assistant Professor, University of South Florida.

Sudipta Tung
DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Early Career Fellow, Department of Biology, Ashoka University, India.

Michael J. McDonald
Assistant Professor, Monash University.

Sergey Kryazhimskiy
Associate Professor, University of California San Diego.

J. David van Dyken
Assistant Professor, University of Miami.

Gabriel Perron
Assistant Professor, Bard College.

Lucy Colwell
Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Cambridge University.

Ivana Cvijovic
Lewis-Sigler Fellow, Princeton University.

Matthew Melissa
Data Scientist, Google.

Ramya Purkanti
Postdoc, Vastenhouw lab, Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.

Lauren Nicolaisen
Data Scientist, Khan Academy.

Benjamin H. Good
Assistant Professor, Stanford University.

Elizabeth R. Jerison
Assitant Professor, University of Chicago.

Evgeni M. Frenkel
Postdoc, Sabatini Lab, Whitehead Institute.

Katya Kosheleva
Bioinformatics Scientist, Invitae.

Daniel P. Rice
Postdoc, Novembre Lab, University of Chicago.

Jose I. Rojas Echenique
Postdoc, Boone Lab, University of Toronto.

Stephen Martis
Graduate Student, UC Berkeley.

Ian Ochs
Graduate Student, Princeton University.

Juhee Goyal
Undergraduate, Harvard College.

Julian Kates-Harbeck
Team Lead, AI, Kernel.

Parris Humphrey
Bioinformatics Scientist, Myriad Genetics