Talia Karasov

Talia is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, School of Biological Sciences where she focuses on host-microbe evolution and the interplay between host genetic diversity and the evolution and spread of microbes. Talia completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in the laboratory of Joy Bergelson. Her thesis research was awarded the best dissertation award from the Committee on Genetics Genomics and Systems Biology at UChicago. After receiving her PhD, Talia was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Detlef Weigel at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen Germany. Her research in the Weigel lab focused on microbial population genomics and is funded by two, count them two, very prestigious fellowships: the EMBO long-term research fellowship as well as a Human Frontiers in Science Program Post-doctoral fellowship. Talia did her undergraduate work at Stanford, and joined the Petrov lab during her Sophomore year in 2006. Her research in the lab focused  primarily on the evolution of insecticide resistance in Drosophila. The work culminated in a paper published in PLoS Genetics that challenged the conventional wisdom and suggested that adaptation in Drosophila is not mutation limited and that Drosophila populations are more than 100-fold larger in their effective size than was previously thought. This paper changed the research of the whole lab to focus it on the understanding of rapid evolutionary processes.