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

July 10, 2025 Sachin's paper was accepted at Genetics. Congratulations Sachin!

July 01, 2025 The Johri Lab is participating in GHIST this year! Read about it here.

Jun 20, 2025 We are attending Evolution this year in Athens, GA. Jacob, Sol, Austin, Cobi, and Parul are all giving talks!

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!

Apr 26, 2025 Jacob has a new preprint! We investigate the effects of rescaling forward-in-time population genetic simulations. Read it here.

Apr 08, 2025 Brian Charlesworth and I propose a gene-based model of fitness and investigate its effects on patterns of linkage disequilibrium and mutational load. Read it here and here.

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

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

Click here for more news