Welcome to my website!

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, where I am working with Kirk Lohmueller (Lohmueller Lab). My research integrates population genetics, empirical human genomics, and biomedical applications.

My overall research goal is to understand how species survive in changing environments by studying their genetic and epigenetic variation. I combine evolutionary theory, population genetics model-based and machine-learning methods, and genomic data to answer the question of how natural selection affects human health.

My research consists of two areas. First, I investigate how humans evolve against viruses. Using protein structures, functional genomics, and gene regulatory networks, I explore how human proteins and regulatory elements evolve in response to viruses. Second, I aim to understand how natural selection connects to non-infectious diseases by focusing on natural selection in Mendelian diseases and the evolution of non-coding genomic regions, which harbor the majority of variants associated with complex diseases.

Previously, I earned my PhD in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona (thesis), advised by David Enard (Enard Lab) and obtained my bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University, China, in 2016.

Please feel free to contact me at chenludi6[at]gmail[dot]com for any professional correspondence.