Ram Lab

Evolution in Culture & Cultural Evolution

We study evolutionary biology, ecology, and cultural evolution using mathematical, computational, and statistical models and collaborations with experimental biologists. See the research page to read more about our research interests and projects.

The lab is part of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at IDC Herzliya.

We are looking for undergraduate, master, and PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and research assistants, including for short periods. If you are interested, please email Yoav.

News

• A new paper on evolution of stress-induced mutation with horizontal gene transfer is now published on The American Naturalist.
• Yoav will present our work at the Molecular Mechanisms in Evolution Gordon Research Conference in June.
• Less fit Lamium plants produce more dispersible seeds: they produce more unspotted seeds, which germinate slower and are preferred by harvester ants over spotted seed. Read about in our new paper.
• Yoav presented some preliminary results on evolution of aneuploidy in the annual meeting of the Israeli Society of Microbiology.
• New paper on cultural evolution with fluctuating transmission rates was accepted by TPB and is now available online.
• The Ram Lab officially opened on October 1st!
• Yoav presented at the Genome Evolution Conference at the Weizmann Institute for Science. You are welcome to view the slides.
• A new paper published in Current Biology, the product of a collaboration with the Kupiec lab at Tel Aviv University, demonstrates that yeast frequently become diploid in the lab.
• In a new TPB paper we presented a modified mean fitness principle for the generation of genetic and phenotypic variation.
• Our paper on the evolution of non-vertical inheritance in changing environments, was published in PNAS!