Leveraging Evolutionary Mismatches to Study Gene-by-Environment Interactions

Julien has taken a diverse path throughout his career. His early training focused on conservation biology which later led him to genetics. He completed his Ph.D. in North Carolina with Drs Eric Stone and Trudy Mackay where he developed a system genetic framework to study the genetic basis of complex traits in Drosophila. He was then elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow, and he is currently a faculty at Princeton University in the EEB department and the Lewis Sigler Genomic Institute. His group seeks to understand how genes interact with each other and their environment to shape variation between individuals. He works both in humans and Drosophila as a model system. Recently his lab has developed approaches leveraging evolutionary mismatches to study gene-by-environment interactions and better understand their contribution of complex traits variation and human diseases. His background in ecology and evolution grounds him as an organismal biologist, and it is in that context that he approaches the molecular and functional work in his lab.

Speaker: Julien Ayroles, Princeton University

Room: Auditorium