Molly Przeworski


Molly Przeworski is a professor in the Department of Systems Biology and Department of Biological Sciences.

The Przeworski lab investigates how natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, and recombination shape the heritable differences seen among individuals and species. To this end, they develop models for the evolutionary process, create statistical tools, and analyze large-scale variation data sets. Among the goals of their research are to understand how natural selection has shaped patterns of genetic variation, and to identify the causes and consequences of variation in recombination and mutation rates, in humans and non-model organisms.

Dr. Przeworski earned her BA in mathematics from Princeton University, her PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and held a postdoctoral fellowship in statistical genetics at the University of Oxford. She was later a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and on the faculty of Brown University and the University of Chicago. She became a visiting professor at Columbia in 2013 and joined the university as a professor in 2014. Her awards include the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist Award, the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award from the Patricia Gruber Foundation, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Computational Molecular Biology.