Diamantis Sellis

Diamantis is a Scientist at Cosmotech modeling complex systems in different industries. After graduating from the Petrov Lab, Diamamntis was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laurent Duret Laboratory at the University of Lyon. As a Graduate Student in Petrov Lab (2007-2014), Diamantis focused on the effects that diploidy has on the process of adaptive evolution using both modelling and experimental evolution in yeast. He showed that adaptation in diplods might lead to a high prevalence of transient balancing selection and maintenance of much greater amounts of consequential genetic variation than would be expected in haploids. This work was published in PNAS in 2011 and the news report about it can be found here. The experimental evolution confirmed that the first, and the largest-effect mutations, in diploid evolution of yeast in a chemostat involves mutations overdominant in fitness. Diamantis also worked on modelling of evolution in pathways and published a really nice paper together with a fellow graduate student Mark Longo.