Assistant Professor, Department of Genetics & Biochemistry
Email: shyamag@clemson.edu
Shyamalika Gopalan
Biosketch
Shyamalika received her B.Sc. in Biology from McGill University in 2012 and her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Stony Brook University in 2019. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California in the Center for Genetic Epidemiology and at Duke University in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology. She joined the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry and the Center for Human Genetics at Clemson University as an Assistant Professor in 2023.
Research Interests
I am interested in understanding how genetics and the environment interact to produce phenotypic variation in humans. I am also interested in understanding how the combined forces of selection and drift have shaped the evolutionary trajectory of these phenotypes evolved in different human populations. I seek to answer these questions by applying computational tools to analyze variation in genomic sequence, DNA methylation, and gene expression. These distinct but inter-related sources of information speak to the impact of past evolutionary forces, the biological function of genetic variation, and the effects of an individual’s environment. Currently, research in the lab focuses on understanding variation in the aging process, studying the drivers of phenotypic change during canid domestication, and developing models of complex trait evolution.
Selected Publications
G Meeks, BM Henn, S Gopalan. Genetic differentiation at probe SNPs leads to spurious results in meQTL discovery. Communications Biology. In press.
Z Lu*, S Gopalan*, D Yuan, DV Conti, B Pasaniuc, A Gusev, N Mancuso. (2022) Multi-ancestry fine-mapping improves precision to identify causal genes in transcriptome-wide association studies. The American Journal of Human Genetics. 109(8):1388-1404.
S Gopalan, SP Smith, K Korunes, I Hamid, S Ramachandran, A Goldberg. (2022) Human genetic admixture through the lens of population genomics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 377(1852):202004103.
S Gopalan*, REW Berl*, JW Myrick, ZH Garfield, AW Reynolds, BK Bafens, G Belbin, M Mastoras, C Williams, M Daya, AN Negash, MW Feldman, BS Hewlett, BM Henn. (2022) Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories during the rise of farming in Eastern Africa. Current Biology. 32(8):1852-1860.e5.
S Gopalan, EG Atkinson, LT Buck, TD Weaver, BM Henn. (2021) Inferring archaic introgression from hominin genetic data. Evolutionary Anthropology. 30(3):199-220.
L Botigue, S Song, A Scheu, S Gopalan, A Pendleton, M Oetjens, A Taravella, T Seregly, A Zeeb-Lanz, RM Arbogast, D Bobo, K Daly, M Unterländer, J Burger, J Kidd, KR Veeramah. (2017) Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the early Neolithic. Nature Communications. 8:16082.
S Gopalan, O Carja, M Fagny, E Patin, JW Myrick, LM McEwen, SM Mah, MS Kobor, A Froment, MW Feldman, L Quintana-Murci, BM Henn. (2017) Trends in DNA methylation with age replicate across diverse human populations. Genetics. 206(3):1659-1674.
Asterisks indicate co-first author