Welcome to my website!

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher with Evan Eichler.

I investigate how natural selection shapes human health and disease.

1) How does natural selection act on diverse noncoding genomic regions and complex mutations, and how do these processes influence chronic disease risk?

2) How did humans adapt to viruses? I combine evolutionary theory, model-based statistical and machine-learning computational approaches, and multi-omic data, including genomes, protein structures, transcription, and epigenomics, to answer these two questions.

In my previous work,

I estimated the distribution of fitness effects of putatively functional noncoding mutations in the human genome and found that the most highly conserved regions account for only a small fraction of deleterious mutations, suggesting that selective pressures have shifted over time (preprint at bioRxiv).

I also discovered that Mendelian disease genes exhibit reduced recent adaptation, highlighting that delayed evolutionary responses to environmental change may contribute to human genetic disease (published in eLife, old model).

I demonstrated that protein stability is a key mechanism of viral adaptation in human proteins (preprint).

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher with Kirk Lohmueller (Lohmueller Lab) at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles.

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.