People
Who We AreKrishna Veeramah
Associate Professor
Krishna received both his B.Sc. in 2003, and Ph.D. in 2008 from University College London. His Ph.D., conducted under the supervision of Mark Thomas, examined the distribution of genetic variation in Africans. He then moved to UCLA as part of John Novembre’s lab where he looked at the genetic architecture of European population isolates. In 2010 he joined Michael Hammer’s lab at the University of Arizona in order to lead a project comparing patterns of genomic variation on the autosomes and X chromosome in apes. Krishna joined the faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook in January 2014 as part of the new initiative in human evolutionary biology where he now runs the Veeramah Lab.
Deven Vyas
Postdoc
Deven received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from University of Florida in August 2017. He is analyzing whole genome sequence data from 5th and 6th century (pre-)Lombard-era cemeteries in order to better understand migration, kinship, and processes of cultural change during these periods.
Kerry Reid
Research Associate (based in HK)
Kerry received her PhD at the University of Pretoria in 2016. Her research focuses on understanding the contemporary processes that shape species diversity and distributions. Her current postdoc is investigating the early evolutionary processes facilitating rapid adaptation in threespined stickleback.
Rachael Herman
Postdoc
Rachael’s research focuses on Antarctic penguins and how they respond to climate change using a combination of ecological modeling and population genetics. She is currently an NSF OPP Postdoctoral Research Fellow investigating epigenetic potential as a driver of local adaptation in gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) along the Western Antarctic Peninsula.
Yijie Tian
PhD Student
Yijie’s interests mainly focus on ancient DNA. She hope to solve questions related to human organization and migration in ancient times by applying ancient DNA methods.
Alexander Kwakye
PhD Student
My interest is to explore how species have adapted to different environmental conditions, and translate these adaptive measures to solve human diseases. In the Veeramah Lab, I will be studying one major way species adapt to new environments, standing genetic variations.
Sarah Vaccaro
PhD Student
Sarah’s interests lie in the field of conservation genomics. Her research is focused on investigating the relationship between epigenetic plasticity and an organism’s ability to tolerate anthropogenic disturbance.
Thomas Bertino
PhD Student
Tom is interested in population genetics, human evolution, ancient DNA and amateur paleontology.
Mariya KonovalyuK
MA Student
I am a Master’s student in the E&E program looking to research areas of evolution involving bacterial resistance & diseases, coevolution, and/or neurogenetics.
Former Lab Members
Dean Bobo – Bionformatician (now at the American Museum of Natural History)
Misha Lipatov – Postdoctoral Scholar
Eduardo Amorim – Postdoctoral Scholar (faculty at Cal State Northridge as of 2021)
Matthew Marano – E&E Masters Student (now grad student at Texas A&M)
Matthew D’Ambrosio – E&E Masters Student (now Scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim)
Wei Jiang – E&E Masters Student (now grad student at USC)
Giulia Bagarolo – Visiting Masters Student
Taylor Medwig – Rotation Student
Shruti Iyer – Rotation Student
Samantha Henry – Rotation Student
Luiz Machado De Olveira Junior – Rotation student
Jacqueline Ryan – Undergraduate and Lab Manager
Mark Milhaven – Undergraduate and Research Associate (now grad student at ASU)
Jonathan Gaige – Undergraduate (now at New York Genome Center)
James Ancona – Undergraduate
Zain Khan – Undergraduate
Priya Chohan – Undergraduate
Jared Mallozi – Undergraduate
Hillary Babalola – Undergraduate
Abu Nafi – Undergraduate
Nicholas Streb – Undergraduate
Hannah Oliver – Undergraduate
Guancheng Zeng – Undergraduate (now Masters student at Imperial College)
Alexsandra Hernandez – Undergraduate (now Master’s student in biomedical science at Stony Brook)
Xiaoyi Xiong – Undergraduate
Arda Sinan Ates – Undergraduate
Vamsi Adabala – Undergraduate
Julia Chivu – Undergraduate
Alina Feng – Undergraduate
Mariana Escobar Rodriguez – Visiting Undergraduate (now PhD student at the Pasteur Institute)
Natalie Dzikowski – Undegraduate and Lab Manager (now PhD student at Duke)
Jeffrey Gaillard- Masters student