Kristy Mualim
PhD Student · Biology · Stanford University
I am a PhD student with Dr. Jose Dinneny at Stanford, studying how plants modify their physiology to adapt to stress. Previously, I was in the Expósito-Alonso lab at UC Berkeley, building computational tools to understand genetic diversity loss in the Anthropocene, and a researcher at Stanford in the Kundaje and Engreitz labs, developing models to study the non-coding regulatory genome.
My work spans plant physiology, conservation genetics, and computational genomics — from understanding stress adaptation mechanisms to predicting genetic diversity loss and mapping enhancer–gene regulatory interactions.
Research
I am broadly interested in developing computational and statistical methods to understand the genetic basis of adaptation and disease. Ongoing research themes include:
- Predicting genetic diversity trajectories under habitat loss and climate change
- Building genome-wide maps of enhancer–gene regulatory interactions
- Analytical models of population divergence and conservation genetics
- Linking non-coding genetic variants to disease genes via chromatin accessibility
News
- 2024 New work on predicting genetic diversity trajectories in the Anthropocene — projecting genetic diversity loss across 13,808 species using habitat data and conservation indicators.
- 2023 Received the ASHG Trainee Research Excellence Award for work on an encyclopedia of enhancer–gene regulatory interactions in the human genome.
- 2023 Preprint: An encyclopedia of enhancer–gene regulatory interactions in the human genome, covering 13M+ interactions across 352 cell types.
- 2022 Published analysis of the mutations-area relationship (MAR) to evaluate UN post-2020 genetic diversity targets.
- 2021 Published in Nature: Linking disease risk variants to target genes using the Activity-by-Contact model across 131 cell types and tissues.
- 2021 Published in Heredity: An analytical solution to estimating population divergence, validated on Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes.