University of Texas at Austin

Parul Johri, Ph.D.

My broad research interests are mutation mechanisms and molecular evolution, especially in mitochondrial DNA. I received my BS in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My undergraduate research experience was in the field of Neuroscience, and my undergraduate thesis focused on mitochondrial DNA mutations in an aging context. I briefly worked as a lab technician at The University of Texas at Austin, working on Cichlid fish before I joined the Cell and Molecular Biology Program at UT under Dr. Justin Havird. My dissertation was on the mechanisms of mitochondrial DNA mutation in Metazoans using computational biology methods and C. Elegans as a model system. I am currently in Dr. Parul Johri’s lab here at UNC in the Biology Department using computational techniques to understand how repeated bottlenecks shape selection in pathogenic metapopulations. My favorite subjects to teach are Evolutionary Biology and Bioinformatics.