Lab Members

Soojin Yi I am broadly interested in questions on genome evolution. This picture is me and a friendly Sea lion in Valdivia, Chile. Many sea lions like to hang out in the fish market there and sleep on man-made structures in the evenings.

Navin Elango I am a graduate student working towards PhD in Biology. My research interests include molecular evolution and population genetics. I am currently working on understanding effects of CpG substitutions on genome evolution. This picture was taken when I visited Grand Canyon in summer 2006.

Zuogang Peng I am interested in molecular evolution and phylogenetics. My previous research includes molecular phylogenetics of catfishes; origin and evolution of otocephalan and acipenseriform fishes; and adaptive evolution of Tibetan plateau catfishes. My current project is to investigate the patterns and causes of substitution rate variation between and within chromosomes in primate genomes. This picture was taken when I took a field work in Tibet.

Brendan Hunt I am a PhD student working with Michael Goodisman and Soojin Yi to study the evolution of social wasps. In accord with the Yi lab, I'm pursuing questions related to the molecular evolution of caste-specific and male-specific gene expression in social insects. Outside the lab, I enjoy going on field collecting trips and getting stung, listening to indie rock, watching good movies, and spending time with my dogs at the dog park.

Jee Young Lee I joined the Yi group in Fall 2007 as a graduate student. My interest is evolutionary genomics. My previous work was to characterize a gene involved in germ cell differentiation in chicken, using bioinformatics. Here's my favorite proverb: while there is life, there is hope.

Lab Alumni

Charles Warden Charles was an undergraduate student who worked in the lab since Fall 2005 until he graduated on Summer 2007. He worked on both experimental and computational projects in the Yi lab, including evolutionary rates in social insects and evolution of fRNA secondary structures. His honors thesis was on evolutionary impacts of coding fRNAs on sequence evolution. Currently he is a graduate student in Princeton University.

Seongho Kim Seongho was a postdoc from January 2005 ~ July 2006 in the Yi lab. He is an applied statistician who enjoys working on real data. Seongho's primary methodological development focuses on analysis of data sets with missing values by various statistical methods, including EM algorithms, graphical models, and MCMC methods. He is currently a postdoc at the Indiana University. This picture is taken in the Children's museum in Indianapolis, where enjoys spending time with his son.