{"id":80541,"date":"2025-05-07T00:57:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T00:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/80541\/"},"modified":"2025-05-07T00:57:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T00:57:10","slug":"evolutionary-geneticist-elected-to-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/80541\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolutionary Geneticist Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Graham Coop<\/a>, professor of evolution and ecology and director of the Center for Population Biology<\/a>,\u00a0has been elected to the\u00a0American Academy of Arts and Sciences<\/a> for his exceptional contribution to his field. Coop is one of nearly 250 new members<\/a> announced by the academy on April 23. He joins 36 other current and former UC Davis faculty<\/a> as academy members.<\/p>\n

Coop is a renowned evolutionary geneticist who has received wide recognition from UC Davis and beyond. At UC Davis, Coop received a 2014 College of Biology Research Prize, was a Chancellor\u2019s Fellow from 2015-19, and received a 2019 Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentorship Award.<\/p>\n

\u201cScience is a team effort,\u201d said Coop. \u201cThis recognition is a credit to everyone who\u2019s worked in our lab over the years, and I’m so pleased on their behalf.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using genetics to reveal how populations evolve<\/strong><\/p>\n

As an evolutionary geneticist, Coop studies how genetics and environmental variation shape populations. He uses a combination of mathematical modeling and data analysis to tackle questions about the causes and consequences of genetic variation within individuals, populations and species.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnderstanding human genetic variation is key to understanding who we are, how we came to be, and how we moved around the world and adapted to our environment,\u201d said Coop. \u201cOur lab has learned a lot about how humans spread around the world and adapted to different environments they encountered, which has helped develop a more nuanced view of the interaction between genetics and the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coop has been involved in a number of groundbreaking studies in human evolution, including a 2006 study that was chosen as one of Science\u2019s top ten breakthroughs of the year<\/a> for revealing that humans and Neanderthals diverged nearly half a million years ago. Other breakthroughs from Coop\u2019s lab include a 2013 study<\/a> which showed that almost everyone of European descent can trace their ancestry back to a common set of ancestors who lived around 1,000 years ago, and a 2020 study<\/a> showing how Neanderthal DNA is slowly being purged from the human genome as a result of natural selection.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the most exciting things in our research at the moment is that we\u2019re starting to be able to identify how natural selection has impacted many parts of the human genome simultaneously,\u201d said Coop. \u201cThis will allow us to create a really refined view of how selection and genetic drift and other evolutionary forces have shaped the past and present distribution of genetic variation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to humans, Coop\u2019s lab studies evolutionary questions in a range of organisms, including the co-evolution of humans and maize in the Americas<\/a>, how walnuts evolved to alternate sexes<\/a>, and how genomics and climate interact to prevent the spread of African honey bees at high latitudes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

From physics to biology<\/strong><\/p>\n

Coop originally trained as a physicist but made the switch to biology during graduate school.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thinking about doing a Ph.D., and one of my lecturers said: \u2018If you\u2019re interested in physics for physics\u2019 sake, then by all means be a physicist, but if you\u2019re interested in working on big questions with interesting math, you should think about working in biology,\u2019\u201d said Coop.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d always been interested in genetics and evolution, and suddenly I saw this whole vista of possibilities open up in front of me. From that moment, I never really looked back, and it\u2019s been a wonderful journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

About the academy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is both an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members and an independent research institution that conducts multidisciplinary, nonpartisan research. Members are nominated and elected by their peers in recognition of their leadership in the arts and sciences, business, philanthropy and public affairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Graham Coop, professor of evolution and ecology and director of the Center for Population Biology,\u00a0has been elected to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3846],"tags":[39150,39153,39151,267,39149,39152,70,5776,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-80541","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences","9":"tag-college-of-biological-sciences","10":"tag-evolution-and-ecology","11":"tag-genetics","12":"tag-honors","13":"tag-population-biology","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-trending","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114463837465735521","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}