Dr. Nandita Garud is an assistant professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department and Human Genetics department at UCLA. She is interested in understanding how natural populations evolve and has been focusing on the human microbiome and Drosophila melanogaster.

Dr. Garud completed her M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Genetics at Stanford University and was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Stanford Center for Evolution and Human Genomics Fellowship. She developed a new statistical method to detect signatures of rapid adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster population genomic data in Dr. Dmitri Petrov’s lab, and was a finalist for the prestigious Walter Fitch Symposium Prize at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution for this work. Dr. Garud subsequently completed her postdoctoral work at the Gladstone Institute at UCSF in Dr. Katie Pollard’s lab studying the evolution of bacteria in the human microbiome. She received the Genetics Society of America DeLill Nasser Award
and Gladstone Institutes Career Advancement Award in recognition of her work on the microbiome. Dr. Garud’s lab is now continuing to study the fascinating intersection of ecological and evolutionary forces shaping genetic diversity in the human gut microbiome.