Awarded in 2024
Home Department: Biology
Faculty Advisors: Dmitri Petrov (Biology) and Jonas Cremer (Biology)

Research Title: Cellular decision-making in dynamically changing environments and population-level consequences

Biological systems function in complex natural environments under physical constraints, interact with each other, and evolve over time to produce the tremendous natural variation that we now observe. Shaili is interested in building an integrative understanding of cellular, ecological, and evolutionary processes, which occur simultaneously at different levels of organization and temporal scales. Organisms operate in dynamically changing environments, yet much of our understanding of cellular behavior and evolution has been restricted to simpler constant environments in the lab. Shaili will use S. cerevisiae (baker’s yeast) as a model system to study the effects of environmental change on cellular physiology and evolution. In addition to lab-strains, she will study the natural variation in behavior in changing environments in wild yeast strains. She will leverage techniques such as experimental evolution with DNA-barcoded strains, genetic manipulations, and mathematical modeling tools from cellular biology and population genetics. Understanding these fundamental questions can be useful for a range of pressing questions, from the dynamics in cancer to the impacts of a changing climate.