Monica Sanchez

Monica is a Postdoc Research Associate in the Molecular and Microbiology Organization at the Sandia National Laboratory. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov lab (2017-2020) where she worked on understanding the concept of long-term fitness and overdominance. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Washington.  She completed her graduate work in Maitreya Dunham’s lab in the Department of Genome Sciences studying how divergent species of yeast adapt to nutrient-limited environments using comparative genomics and experimental evolution. Specifically, she identified changes in non-coding regions that shape multiple different evolutionary outcomes across the Saccharomyces clade. She is interested in studying the effect of genetic background differences on general mechanisms of evolvability and aims to understand how genetic and environmental interactions affect adaptation and complex traits.