Lab Members
Joshua Akey
Assistant Professor
akeyj at u.washington.edu
Curriculum Vitae
The intrepid leader of the wily gang of genome scientists.
Graduate students
Leslie Emery
Graduate Student
emeryl at u.washington.edu
Leslie is interested in the question of human uniqueness, primatology, human demographic history, early human origins, and phylogenetics & systematics.
Caitlin Connelly
Graduate Student
cait2249 at u.washington.edu
Caitlin is particularly focused on yeast genomics and evolution. She is currently investigating the evolution of noncoding regions in yeast.
Jenny Andrie
Graduate Student
jmwagner at u.washington.edu
Jenny is interested in yeast genomics. She is focused on the genetics of post-transcriptional processes and their effects on gene expression and protein levels.
Ben Vernot
Graduate Student
bvernot at u.washington.edu
Ben is interested in human population genetics.
Rachel Gittelman
Graduate Student
rgittel at u.washington.edu
Rachel is interested in how evolution has shaped genetic variation in humans and other primates.
Postdocs
Timothy O'Connor
Postdoctoral Fellow
timothydoconnor at gmail.com
Tim is interested in rare variant association methods, genotype-phenotype mapping in general, population structure, and South Amerindian population genetics.
Wenqing Fu
Postdoctoral Fellow
wqfu at u.washington.edu
Wenqing is interested in the biological and evolutionary processes shaping the patterns of genomic variants, and the genetic mechanisms underlying human traits and diseases.
Research scientists
Jennifer Madeoy
Research Scientist
jmadeoy at u.washington.edu
Jenny is currently the longest tenured member of the Akey lab and oversees essentially all experimental studies conducted in the lab. Simply put, without Jenny and Marnie experiments in the Akey lab would come to a grinding halt!
Marnie Briceno
Research Scientist
marniebriceno at gmail.com
Marnie also makes an integral contribution to all things experimental in the Akey lab. She too has a hand in almost all of the experimental studies, and has particularly been focused on yeast genomics.
Dayna Akey
Research Scientist
dakey at u.washington.edu
When she is not chasing after our two boys, Dayna is chasing down several projects in canine genomics. She has a long-standing interest in mapping genes contributing to inherited canine diseases and continuing to pursue similar projects in the Akey lab.
Former Lab Members
John CalhounResearch Consultant
2005 - 2007
johnccalhoun at gmail.com
John was one of the earliest members of the Akey lab and helped to set up our computational resources, as well as helping out in a variety of programming projects. He also ran a mini convenience store in the lab for several years, which the graduate students (and others) came to depend on for nourishment. John is currently a senior clinical programmer at a pharmaceutical company. In his spare time he developed this website for us!
James Ronald
Ph.D. 2007
jscr at u.washington.edu
James completed his Ph.D. in the Akey lab in June 2007, where he performed some really elegant work on the evolution of gene expression QTL in yeast. He was also the primary source of nefarious activity in the Akey lab. Currently, he is finishing medical school at the University of Washington, but still drops by occasionally to throw the lab football and reminisce.
Charla Lambert
Ph.D. 2008
lacharla at mail.med.upenn.edu
Charla completed her Ph.D. in September 2008. Formally, she was a student of Maynard Olson, but relocated to the Akey lab when Maynard went on sabbatical as a prelude to retirement. Charla's thesis focused on human evolutionary genomics, with an emphasis on the evolutionary history of the DARC gene. Following a postdoc in Sarah Tishkoff's laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, she now works at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Shameek Biswas
Ph.D. 2010
sbiswas at u.washington.edu
Shameek worked on the development of statistical and computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional molecular phenotype data. Much of his work in the Akey lab focused on developing and applying dimension reduction techniques (such as PCA and ICA) to genotype and gene expression data. He now works at Novo Nordisk Inflammation Research Center.
Thomas Nicholas
Ph.D. 2010
tjn3 at u.washington.edu
Tom pursued several projects in canine genomics. He primarily focused on developing a map of segmental duplications and copy number polymorphisms in a panel of phenotypically, morphologically, and behaviorally diverse breeds. Tom also worked on the analysis of DNA sequence variation and SNPs in a large panel of dog breeds. He is now a postdoc at Scripps Translational Science Institute.
Jacob Tennessen
Postdoctoral Fellow
jacob.tennessen at gmail.com
Jacob worked on several projects in evolutionary genetics, with a particular emphasis on detecting adaptively evolving genomic regions in large-scale human data sets. He is now a postdoc at Oregon State University.
Dan Skelly
Ph.D. 2012
daskelly at u.washington.edu
Dan worked on a number of evolutionary and functional genomics studies in yeast, including the use of digital gene expression analysis to better delimit the genetic architecture of regulatory variation in natural isolates of yeast.
