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
Gautam Reddy
NSF-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow

gautam_nallamala [at] fas.harvard.edu
Artur Rego-Costa
Graduate Student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Artur first joined the lab on 2017 as an exchange M.S. student, and then as a Ph.D. student in 2018. He earned his B.S from the U. of Brasília, and joint M.S. from U. of Groningen and U. of Montpellier. He is currently using deep-sequencing data from experimentally evolved yeast populations to answers questions about predictability of evolutionary dynamics.

rego-costa [at] g.harvard.edu [website]
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 his BA in maths and biology from Carleton College and joined the lab in 2019. He is studying how repetitive exposure to COVID-19 and flu vaccinations affects the binding affinity and the recognition breadth of B cell receptors within a repertoire.

amoulana [at] g.harvard.edu
Tanush Jagdish
Graduate Student in Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology

Tanush joined the lab in 2019. He is currently working to apply molecular barcoding methods to the E. coli Long-term evolution experiment.

tanush [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
Jeffrey Chang
Graduate Student in Physics

Jeffrey joined the lab in 2021. He is interested in understanding the structure and statistics of protein-protein interaction landscapes.

jeffrey_chang [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 joined the lab in 2022. He is working to understand evolutionary dynamics in the immune system using a combination of in vitro directed evolution and random mutagenesis to analyze the landscapes of antibody binding affinities.

berk_alpay [at] g.harvard.edu [website]

Lab Alumni

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
Assistant 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
Postdoc, Quake Lab, Stanford University.

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