Parul Johri, PhD
Parul Johri, IBGS faculty member and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Genetics, has been awarded this year’s Early Career Excellence Award from the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), the top young investigator award in her field of research.
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 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. Parul received her Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Delhi, and a Master’s in Biology from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. She earned her PhD in the Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior program at Indiana University, Bloomington, under the supervision of Michael Lynch in 2018, and completed her postdoctoral work with Jeffrey Jensen at Arizona State University (2018-2022). Parul started her lab at UNC in 2023.