About
Dr. Leonid Kruglyak received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University and his MS and PhD degrees, also in physics, from the University of California at Berkeley. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Oxford University, he joined the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research as a research scientist. Subsequently, Dr. Kruglyak held a faculty position in the Human Biology Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where he was also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. In 2005, Dr. Kruglyak returned to Princeton University as a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. In 2008, he was again selected an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2010, Dr. Kruglyak was named the inaugural William R. Harman ’63 and Mary-Love Harman Professor in Genomics. He also chaired the Graduate Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology at Princeton. In 2013, Dr. Kruglyak moved to the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he holds appointments in the Departments of Human Genetics (serving as Chair since July 2016) and Biological Chemistry and continues to serve as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also a founding member of the Computational Biosciences Institute. Dr. Kruglyak is a recipient of many awards, including a James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in Human Genetics, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics, a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, and an Agilent Thought Leader Award. In 2007 he was named a Highly Cited Researcher in Molecular Biology and Genetics by ISI Thomson Scientific and elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for distinguished contributions to the study of variation in the human genome and for pioneering genetic studies of gene expression variation.” Dr. Kruglyak was the recipient of the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics in 2015 and the Edward Novitski Prize from the Genetics Society of America in 2016. His research interests focus on understanding the genetic basis of complex phenotypes.
His lab conducts experiments in model organisms (currently, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans), as well as computational analyses, aimed at understanding how changes at the level of DNA are shaped by molecular and evolutionary forces, and how these changes lead to all the observable differences among individuals within a species.
Currently Receiving Doctoral Students