Danielle (Danni) Presgraves, Ph.D., joined the JAX Genomic Education team as Director, Data Science Training in December 2023. Danni completed her undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Cellular, Molecular, Microbial Biology at the University of Calgary in Canada. As an undergraduate research assistant in a mouse behavioral genetics lab, she studied the genetic architecture of left- and right-handedness. After a one-year stint at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Danni entered the Ph.D. program in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. For her dissertation, she developed theoretical population genetics models of mutation, recombination, and natural selection. As a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, Danni contributed to computational analyses of human genetic variation as part of the 1000 Genomes Project. She then joined the faculty at the University of Rochester, where she created and taught courses in Biostatistics, Python, and R. During her tenure at the University of Rochester, Danni co-founded the Computational Biology major and Masters in Genetic Counseling programs. She also served as a faculty adviser for Biology majors and was the co-director of the Rochester Early Medical Scholars program.
