The Sagol Lab for Information and Evolution
Our method enables measuring the de novo origination rates of individual mutations (as opposed to mutation-rate averages across loci) for the first time. Using this method, we have shown that the human malaria-resistant hemoglobin S mutation originates de novo more frequently in the gene and population where it is of adaptive significance.
The mixability theory for the role of sex in evolution served a motivational role in the development of a key advance that contributed to enabling the breakthrough of deep learning in 2012 and the ensuing artificial intelligence revolution.
Prof. Livnat is a former fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley.
Prof. Livnat was a visiting core member of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley.
Prof. Livnat received his Ph.D with Simon Levin and Steve Pacala at Princeton University.
Prof. Melamed is a former HHMI fellow in the lab of Stanley Fields at the University of Washington at Seattle.
The late John Nash took interest in this paper by Livnat and Pippenger, also covered by the Communications of the ACM.
Our lab is a part of the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology and the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa. See our Departmental Darwin Day tradition.
We are currently funded by the Sagol Network and by the John Templeton Foundation.
We have collaborated with leading theoretical computer scientists Christos Papadimitriou, Umesh Vazirani and Nick Pippenger on work at the interface of evolutionary biology and computer science.
We have collaborated with Marc Feldman from Stanford University on the problem of the role of sexual recombination in evolution and with Karl Skorecki, Dean of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University and director of the Molecular Medicine lab at the Technion and Rambam.