Priya Moorjani
Assistant 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.
Yul
in 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.
Laurits Skov
Postdoctoral Researcher
lauritsskov at berkeley dot edu
Laurits did his PhD (2017) in Bioinformatics at Aarhus Univeristy in Mikkel Heide Schierup’s group. Here he developed a method for detecting Neandertal and Denisovan ancestry in modern humans without using the archaic reference genomes and used it to find archaic segments in 27,566 Icelanders and 89 Papuans. He did a postdoc in Benjamin Peters group (2018-2021) at the Max Planck institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig where he further studied archaic introgression in ancient genomes and studied Neandertal communities. In the Moorjani Lab, he will be focusing on studying archaic introgression in South Asian populations and evolution of human germline mutation rate.
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.
Jierui (Jerry) Xu
Student Researcher
jierui.xu at berkeley dot edu
Jerry is a second-year undergraduate student majoring in Molecular & Cell Biology and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. During his freshman year, he worked on computational biology research focusing on natural language processing at iGEM at Berkeley. Jerry joined Moorjani Lab in Summer 2021. He will be working on machine learning methods to investigate population genetics analysis of human populations.
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.
Elena
Zavala
Miller Postdoctoral fellow
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. During her PhD, she used ancient DNA from skeletal remains and sediments to reconstruct occupational patterns of ancient humans and other mammals at Paleolithic sites. She also demonstrated how ancient DNA methods can increase success rates for DNA profiling in forensic casework. As a Miller fellow, she is interested in developing and evaluating computational and laboratory methods for working with low quality samples in ancient DNA and forensic genetics
Jesseon
Chang
Graduate Student
jesseon_chang at berkeley dot edu
Jesseon is a first year PhD student in the Molecular and Cell Biology PhD Program. He graduated from Cornell University with a BS in Engineering Physics and an MEng in Computer Science, and worked as a software engineer for several years. Prior to Berkeley, he worked in the Rock lab at the Rockefeller University, and used the lab’s CRISPRi system to study Mycobacterium tuberculosis and developed a database and analytics platform for over 50,000 tuberculosis genomes. In the Moorjani lab, he will be working on incorporating complex population history and structure to identify selection in admixed 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.
Group Photos
Vivian Slon visits UC Berkeley, 2022
Lab lunch and Boba, 2020
At Computational Biology Retreat, 2019
Lab Picnic with Submant Lab, 2018
Moorjani Lab 