Parul Johri, PhD (Assistant Professor, Biology and Genetics) won the 2024 Early-Career Excellence Award from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
This award is intended for outstanding members of the SMBE community who are in the early stages of an independent research career (3-7 years post-Ph.D.). The primary signal of research excellence is a trajectory of innovative, creative research that is moving the field of Molecular Biology and Evolution forward. The ideal candidate will be one whose career embodies the values of the society, for example in mentoring, outreach, and teaching. The prize includes recognition at the annual SMBE banquet, a cash prize and a travel award to attend the annual meeting.
The Johri Lab focuses on how non-adaptive evolutionary processes, including selection against deleterious mutations, population history, and genome architecture, act to jointly shape genomic variation. Research in the lab involves a combination of computational and theoretical approaches, statistical method development, and analyses of sequence variation data from natural populations.
The award announcement can be found here.