This Is What Science Looks Like at NC State: Nadia Singh

Editor’s note: This post was written by Nadia Singh, an assistant professor of biological sciences at NC State. The post is an entry in an ongoing series that we hope will highlight the diversity of researchers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The series is inspired by the This Is What A Scientist Looks Like site.

My name is Nadia Singh and I am an evolutionary biologist. Evolution is a powerful force, and in my lab we spend our days trying to understand the major drivers of evolutionary change. We are primarily interested in understanding how DNA changes over evolutionary time.

It is well known that many processes – including mutation, recombination, natural selection and random genetic drift – play significant roles in the generation and maintenance of genetic variation within and between species. A major goal of my work is to determine the individual and joint contributions of each of these forces to genome evolution. We leverage a variety of approaches in our research including genetics, genomics, bioinformatics and computational biology. We use the fruit fly Drosophila as our primary model system, but have recently expanded our research to include mice in our research as well. These systems are exceptionally well understood genetic and genomic model systems, which makes them very powerful for our research.

I got my start in science as a high school student, through an NIH Summer Apprentice Program in Biomedical Research. Through this program, I had the incredible fortune to work with Carolyn Cousin, a professor of biology at the University of the District of Columbia who is a renowned electron microscopist with a long-standing interest in schistosomiasis. Because I thoroughly enjoyed this experience, I continued to pursue research opportunities following my graduation from high school. These opportunities included a year-long stint as a technician in Robert Glazer’s breast cancer research lab at Georgetown University Medical Center, a three year undergraduate research appointment in Stephen Palumbi’s marine molecular ecology lab at Harvard University, and a year as a technician in the Program for Population Genetics at the Harvard School of Public Health. I earned my Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University under the mentorship of Dmitri Petrov in 2006, and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Andrew Clark and Chip Aquadro at Cornell University from 2006-2010. I joined the faculty at NC State in 2010.

I have been incredibly lucky over the years to have worked with and near truly remarkable people. While most of these folks have been biologists, one of those individuals is the very talented environmental chemist Matthew Polizzotto, whom I had the good fortune to meet (and marry!) when we were graduate students. We now have two young daughters, Isabella (4) and Annika (1) who love to laugh, dance, and climb anything in sight.