Uricchio lab
Uricchio lab @Tufts
Image of Nahant beach

Thank you for visiting our research page. We are a computational group at Tufts University working on Ecology and Evolution and Global Change Biology.

Our research asks "when is evolution important for explaining species' persistence, and why?" We integrate models from evolutionary genetics and community ecology with experimental data from microbes and marine snails to help answer this question. We also seek to enact positive change in our scientific and local communities, especially through collaborative STEM education research. If you are interested in joining the lab, please find more information on the People page.


Lab News

  • March 2026: Kasturi Lele's preprint on the relationship between adaptive dynamics and population genomics models of coexistence is out.

  • March 2026: Alejandro Calderon's preprint on the potential role of rare alleles in rapid divergence is available.

  • January 2026: Grad student Kasturi Lele's paper on demography and community assembly in microbes is out in Ecology.

  • July 2025: Alejandro Calderon and postdoctoral scholar Dr. Dan Wuitchik presented their work at the Gordon Research Conference on Dynamics of Ecological and Evolutionary change. Dan, Alejandro, and Lawrence enjoying the conference

  • May 2025: Postdoc Dr. Dan Wuitchik has published his first paper on slipper snail genomics and evolution in BMC Genomics.

  • April 2024: Our new adaptation rate estimation method, developed with collaborator David Enard's group, is out in G3.

  • February 2024: Our new phylogenomic approach for inferring loci involved in interspecific competition is out in Ecology Letters. Congrats Nicolas!

  • July 2023: Alejandro Calderon presented his work on adaptation rates in multivoltine insects at SISG at the Univsersity of Washington. Congrats Alejandro! Kasturi presents in front of her poster at a Gordon Conference on Microbial Ecology

  • July 2023 Kasturi Lele presented her work on community assembly of microbes at a Gordon Conference on Microbial Ecology. Congrats Kasturi! Kasturi presents in front of her poster at a Gordon Conference on Microbial Ecology

  • June 2023: Congratulations to Kasturi Lele, who passed her qualifying exam today! Her projects address microbial community assembly dynamics using both modeling and experiments.

  • May 2023: Our preprint on phylogenomics and interspecific competition is out! Congrats to Wolfe Lab PhD student Nicolas Louw, who led this project.

  • Janurary 2023: A new paper is out in Ecology. We examine the dynamics of pathogen transmission when pathogens can be spread by multiple distinct mechanisms, with applications to population declines in apline carnations. Many thanks to co-authors Janis Anotovics, Mike Boots, Emme Bruns, and Michael Hood!

  • Janurary 2023: Lawrence and SJ attended the AmNat conference at Asilomar State Beach, where we presented some preliminary results about the evolutionary dynamics of costly disease resistance alleles. You can find SJ's poster here. Congrats SJ on a successful first conference!

  • August 2022: Undergraduates Alison Leav and Daphne Garcia completed summer projects in the lab, focusing on pigeon adaptation to climate change and the evolutionary processes underlying genomic vulnerability. Thanks for making this such a stimulating summer!

  • July 2022: We received a Springboard Award to work collaboratively with Julia Svoboda, which will help us to further develop our work on the navigation of scientific identities in computational biology classrooms. This work is led by our incredible colleague Sugat Dabholkar.

  • April 2022: Undergraduate Daphne Garcia will join the lab to study genomic vulnerability using model-based simulations. Daphne received a Tufts Summer Fellowship. Welcome Daphne!

  • January 2022: New paper out in Trends in Parasitology, led by Emily Ebel. Dr. Ebel evaluates the malaria hypothesis using modern GWAS summary statistic data for severe malaria incidence. The paper can be found here, unfortunately it is behind a paywall but you can email us for a copy.

  • December 2021: We had our first official lab event! A small outing to Boston to visit a holiday market. Photo credit to SJ McGeady. Lab outing to Boston with SJ McGeady, Kasturi Lele, Alejandro Calderon, Adam Pepi, and Lawrence Uricchio

  • October 2021: Welcome to Adam Pepi, the lab's first postdoc! Adam joins us from UC Davis, where he completed his PhD in entomology. Adam is a population ecologist whose work combines field studies and mathematical modeling. He researches the role of climate and infectious disease in shaping species population dynamics. At Tufts he will combine genomic data from butterflies with population modeling to study how climate may jointly shape local adaptation and population dynamics. Welcome Dr. Pepi, we are so lucky to have you here.

  • September 2021: The lab welcomes three rotating graduate students: SJ McGeady, Kasturi Lele, and Alejandro Calderon! The students are working on a mixture of theoretical and computational topics, including the eco-evolutionary determinants of disease-related adaptation, the role of rare variants in evolutionary processes, and mediators of coexistence in microbial communities.

  • August 2020: We are recruiting PhD students for the fall 2021 cohort in Biology at Tufts, please click here for more info! The application deadline is December 1, 2020.