Priya Moorjani

Associate Professor

Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology

Center for Computational Biology

moorjani at berkeley dot edu

Priya did a bachelors in Computer Engineering at the University of Mumbai and M.S. in Bioinformatics at George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University, working with David Reich and Nick Patterson. She did her postdoc with Molly Przeworski at Columbia University. She moved to Berkeley in 2018.

Yulin Zhang

Graduate Student

zhangyulin9806 at berkeley dot edu

Yulin is a first year student in the Computational Biology PhD program at UC, Berkeley. She graduated from the Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), Guangdong, China with a B.S. in Computational Biology. In SYSU, she worked on cancer evolution, investigating the pattern of cancer cell migration and the evolutionary process of tumorigenesis. In Fall 2019, she attended UC Berkeley as an exchanged student and worked with Rasmus Nielsen’s group on genetic rescue and selection. In the Moorjani lab, Yulin will be working on identifying signatures of selection in admixed populations.

Elise Kerdoncuff

Postdoctoral Researcher

kerdoncuff at berkeley dot edu

Elise did her bachelor’s in Biology and Applied Mathematics and a Master in Ecology, Biodiversity and Evolution at the Sorbonne University, France. She received her Ph.D (2021) in Population Genetics from the Sorbonne University where she worked with Guillaume Achaz and Amaury Lambert at the Natural History Museum and the College de France, Paris, France. During her Ph.D, she developed methods to infer the recent demography of human populations leveraging polymorphisms and genetic linkage data. Elise joined the Moorjani Lab in 2022. She is working on South Asian population history and local ancestry inference.

Meaghan Marohn

Graduate student

meaghan_marohn at Berkeley dot edu

Meghan is a PhD student in the Molecular and Cell Biology program at UC, Berkeley. She graduated from Barnard College, where she studied Biology and Anthropology. Following graduation, Meaghan worked for two years in Dr. Catherine Pei-Ju Lu’s lab at NYU Langone, investigating transcriptomic changes in inflammatory skin disease using single cell RNA sequencing. In the Moorjani lab, Meaghan will explore population genetics and the evolution of mutation rate across species.

Nathan Cramer

NSF GRFP Fellow

natecramer at berkeley dot edu

Nathan is a PhD student in the Molecular and Cell Biology graduate program. In 2018, he received a degree in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley. Upon graduating, he spent two additional years working at UCSF as a staff research associate. During his time in the Anderson Lab, he analyzed the “promiscuous” gene expression patterns in Aire-expressing cells of the thymus and periphery. In the Moorjani Lab, he is working on understanding mutation rate variation among human populations.

Sarah Johnson

Graduate Student

sarahj32 at berkeley dot edu

Sarah is a PhD student in the computational biology program. She graduated from the University of Washington in 2017 with a degree in cellular, molecular, and developmental biology. During undergrad, she worked in the Brewer-Raghuraman lab studying origins of DNA replication in yeast. After graduation, she worked at Adaptive Biotechnologies for 4 years analyzing how various diseases and therapies shape the adaptive immune system. In the Moorjani lab, Sarah will be studying introgression in early modern humans.

Sophie Joseph

Postdoctoral Researcher

skjoseph at berkeley dot edu

Sophie completed her dual bachelor’s in Geological Sciences–Paleobiology and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020). She received her PhD (2025) in Biological Anthropology from Emory University, where she worked in the Lindo Ancient DNA Lab studying natural selection and demographic change in the ancient human populations of South America. Sophie joins the Moorjani Lab in summer 2025 and will work on characterizing archaic Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in present-day East Asian populations.

Nam Dao

Undergraduate Student

namdao2404 at berkeley dot edu

Nam is a third year undergraduate double majoring in applied mathematics and chemical biology. His previous work concerned wet lab chemical biology work toward the development of covalent inhibitors of methionine and tryptophan residues. In his free time, he enjoys reading and discussing continental philosophy, as well as going on walks and hikes throughout Berkeley. At the Moorjani Lab, he is working to utilize various machine learning algorithms for the determination of the origins of genes across Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans.

Dayana Zavala

Undergraduate Student

dayana at berkeley dot edu

Dayana Zavala is a second year undergraduate student majoring in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. She completed her high school diploma alongside earning an Associate degree in Communications at Bakersfield College. Dayana joined the Moorjani Lab in the Summer 2024. In the Moorjani Lab, she is working on implementing a pipeline to detect de novo mutations using pedigree sequencing data.

Neha Ravikumar

Undergraduate Student

rmneha at berkeley dot edu

Neha Ravikumar is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science . She joined the Moorjani Lab in Spring 2025 and is testing the robustness of archaic introgression detection methods for blended genomes. In her free time, Neha enjoys running, going to the gym, and spending time outdoors.

Alumni from our lab

Laurits Skov

Postdoctoral Researcher, 2022-2024

Laurits did his PhD (2017) in Bioinformatics at Aarhus Univeristy in Mikkel Schierup’s group. In the Moorjani Lab, he worked on studying archaic introgression in South Asian populations and evolution of human germline mutation rate. He is now an Assistant Professor in the section for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Globe Institute, Denmark.

Elena Zavala

Miller Postdoctoral fellow, 2022-2024

Elena did her B.S in Biochemistry and B.A. in Music from Santa Clara University and a Masters in forensic science. She got her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) in Matthias Meyer’s group. In the Moorjani Lab, she worked on developing and evaluating computational and laboratory methods for working with low quality, degraded samples in ancient DNA and forensic genetics. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Manjusha Chintalapati

Postdoctoral Researcher, 2019-2023

Manjusha received her PhD (2018) in Computer Science from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) working with Kay Prufer. In the Moorjani Lab, he worked on studying the evolution of mutation rate and characterizing patterns of gene flow in ancient DNA samples, including archaic admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans. He is now Scientific Researcher, AncestryDNA, San Francisco, CA.

Rémi Tournebize

Postdoctoral Researcher, 2019-2020

Remi received his PhD (2017) in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Montpellier, France working with Valéria Poncet and Stéphanie Manel. In the Moorjani Lab, he worked on reconstructing founder events in human evolution using data from ancient DNA and present-day individuals. He is now Permanent Researcher at the French National Research Institute, Montpellier, France (equivalent to Assistant Professor in France).

Jesseon Chang

Graduate student, 2022-2023

Jesseon received his BS (2011) in Engineering and Physics from Cornell University. In the Moorjani lab, he worked on studying natural selection in admixed populations, with a focus on developing new methods. He obtained a Master’s in Science from the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (2023) and is now working as as Quantitative Developer at the