Bernard Kim

Bernard is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov lab (2018-now) and will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Princeton EEB in 2025. He is broadly interested in understanding how population genetic processes shape genetic diversity at the macroevolutionary timescale . During his PhD with Kirk Lohmueller at UCLA, he studied the distribution of fitness effects in humans and showed how segregating deleterious variation plays an important role in shaping patterns of introgression between hybridizing species. In the Petrov Lab, Bernard is leading the effort to build a large scale, comparative polymorphism dataset of many species of Drosophila - ultimately generating complete genomes of all ~4000 species in Drosophilidae and polymorphism data from hundreds if not thousands of Drosophila species. The first two papers have come out and many more in the pipeline:“Highly contiguous assemblies of 101 drosophilid” genomes and “Widespread introgression across a phylogeny of 155 Drosophila”.  He hopes to learn how the landscape of adaptation and constraint changes at this time scale, and what the importance of gene flow is in shaping these processes.