Pleuni Pennings

Pleuni is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at the University of San Francisco. She was a Research Associate in the Petrov Lab (2012-2014). She studies the evolution of drug resistance in HIV using genetic and epidemiological data and population genetic theory. She has analyzed the role of standing genetic variation for drug resistance in HIV (Pennings, 2012) and currently works on selective sweeps and mutation-selection balance in HIV.  Before joining the Petrov lab, she worked with John Wakeley at Harvard University and with Susanne Foitzik at the University of Munich (LMU). Her graduate work with Joachim Hermisson let to a series of seminal papers on the genetics of adaptation in the non-mutation limited regime. With these papers they coined the term “soft sweep”: Hermisson and Pennings 2005, 2006, and 2006). Pleuni also makes videos about science. A video about her recent HIV paper can be found here one about recent work on slavemaking ants is here and an old favorite about experimental evolution is here.

The link to her website is here.