David Enard, Ph.D.

David Enard, Ph.D.

2022 Early Career Scholars Award
Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
College of Science
David Enard

David Enard is an assistant professor in the University of Arizona Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department. His primary research interests are adaptive evolution, host-pathogen interactions, human evolution, and population genomics. During his time as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dmitri Petrov‘s lab at Stanford University, David focused on detecting positive selection in the human genome. He earned his PhD in Dr. Hugues Roest Crollius‘s lab at the École normale supérieure in Paris.

The Enard Lab studies ancient epidemics through the lens of host genomic adaptation and develops new methods to better quantify genomic adaptation in general. We examine the intersection of quantitative evolutionary genomics and environmental and ecological contexts to give a broader understanding to the recent developments in the field, focusing specifically on the interplay between diseases and adaptation. We do this by leveraging the power of genome-wide approaches to study the role of natural selection in the evolution of infectious diseases in humans and other mammals. This research program is articulated around two main axes: (I) the development of novel methods to quantify adaptation genome-wide and (II) the identification of the ecological causes of adaptation with in particular the study of ancient epidemics.