David Lawrie

David is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the lab of Kevin Thornton at UC Irvine. David was a Graduate Student in Petrov Lab (2007-2013) working primarily on the inference of functionality from genomics data. One of his most exciting discoveries was the finding that a fifth of all synonymous sites in Drosophila appear to be suject to very strong selection constraint . This paper was published in PLoS Genetics. In addition,  David showed that weak selection and mutational biases can produce unexpected results with, for example, unconstrained sequences evolving slower than constrained ones in the absence of adaptation. David did his undergraduate work in computational biology at Cornell with Andy Clark and Adam Siepel and came to Stanford Genetics Department as a graduate student in 2007.