Ram Lab

We study evolution, ecology, cultural evolution, and epidemiology, using mathematical, computational, statistical, and machine-learning models and collaborations with empirical biologists. See the research page to read more about our research interests and projects.

Our lab is in the School of Zoology in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University.
We are also affiliated with the Sagol School of Neuroscience, the Safra Center for Bioinformatics, and the Center for Combatting Pandemics at Tel Aviv University.

News

• Congratulations to Saar for successfuly defending his MSc thesis, titled "Cultural Evolutionary Dynamics with Success and Influence Bias".
• We received a BSF grant together with David Gresham from NYU! The grant topics is Integrated experimental and simulation-based inference to study copy number variation in evolution.
• New paper is out in PLOS Biology! We infered rate and effect of CNV in yeast using neural networks and simulations. A collaboration with the Gresham lab at New York University, led by Grace Avecilla.
• Congratulations to Joshua Caleb Mcdonald for being selected as a Zuckerman postdoctoral scholar! Josh will formally join our lab next week.
• New paper on the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 under lockdowns and testing with Yael Gurevich and Lilach Hadany.
• The Israeli Society for Evolutionary Biology will host it's third annual conference on March 9-10 at Weizmann Institute.
• New postdoc at the lab, Remus Stana, who recently received his PhD in mathematics from Leeds University.
• We welcome to the lab a new graduate student, Rony, and two visiting students Talia, Luise.
• Our paper on late effective start date of NPIs (lockdowns) during the first wave of COVID outbreaks is published at IJID. Work by Ilia Kohanovski and a collaboration with Uri Obolski.
• New paper on the evolution of altruism under conformity and content-biased cultural transmission is now published in Theoretical Population Biology. This is a collaboration with Marc Feldman and Kaleda Denton of Stanford University.
• Congratulations to Boaz Shvarzman for successfully defending his thesis on evolution of artificial neural networks!
• New preprint on simulation-based inference from adaptive dynamics using neural networks. This is a collaboration with the Gresham lab at New York University, led by Grace Avecilla.
• Congratulations to Dor Cohen for successfully defending his thesis on cultural evolution of cooperation!
• New preprint by Gabriela Lobinska on inheritance of the mutation rate and its effect on complex adaptive evolution is now available on bioRxiv.
• New paper on cultural evolution of cooperation, with emphasis on non-vertical transmission and assortment, now published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B! This research was done by Dor Cohen in cooperation with Ohad Lewin-Epstein and Marc Feldman.
• Congratulations to Gabriela for recieving the Alvin, Myra, and David Kaye memorial award for excellence in research from the Feinberg Graduate School, Weizmann Institute of Science.
• Check out our new preprint on the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 under NPIs and testing with Yael Gurevich and Lilach Hadany.
• A story in Stanford News discusses our new paper on adaptive social contact rates during epidemics that was published in PLOS Computational Biology.
• Congratulations to Gabriela for winning the best talk prize at ISEB 2020!
• We posted two new preprints on cultural evolution of cooperation and altrusim, Cohen et al. and Denton et. al.
• Yoav gave a talk at the Gruter Institute Squaw Valley meeting on Evolution of Cooperation.
• Yoav presented a poster at the EMBL Conference on Molecular Mechanisms in Evolution and Ecology.
• We are moving to the School of Zoology at Tel Aviv University.
• Our proposal for mitigating SARS-CoV-2 infection has received media attention on ynet and Channel7.
• Yoav recieved the Excellence in Teaching award from IDC Herzliya.
• A new perspective for mitigation of SARS-CoV-2 infection: priming the innate immune system for viral attack: new paper with Oren Kolodny, Michael Berger, and Marc Feldman.
• A new preprint on adaptive social contact rates during epidemics is online, the product of a collaboration with Stanford & Harvard researchers.
• The ISF has accepted our joint grant proposal with Hadany lab (TAU) on modeling behavioral dynamics and their effect on SARS-CoV-2 transmission and evolution.
• The Templeton Foundation has accepted our grant proposal on quantifying gene-culture convolution. This research is a collaboration with Prof. Feldman (Stanford University) and Kevin Laland (St. Andrews University).
• Our paper on cultural evolution of conformity and anticonformity was published in PNAS. The paper is a result of a collaboration with Marc Feldman and Kaleda Denton of Stanford University and Uri Liberman of Tel Aviv University.
• Ilia and Yoav have posted a new preprint: Inferring the effective start dates of non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID-19 outbreaks
• Yoav and Oren Kolodny have posted a new preprint: A new perspective for mitigation of SARS-CoV-2 infection: priming the immune system for attack.
• Yoav gave a talk at the ILANIT/FISEB conference on Thu, Feb 20 in Eilat, and in the Language of Evolution and the Evolution of Language conference at the Weizmann Institute on Feb 23.
• Yoav talk at the Evolution workshop of TAU Theory-fest (January 1st at Tel Aviv University) is available on YouTube.
• Our 2019 paper about predicting competitions from growth curve data was criticized in new letter, and you can now also read our reply.
• Yoav, Ilia, and Boaz attended the First Meeting of the Israeli Society for Evolutionary Biology on December 11-12 at Tel Aviv University.
• Ilia presented a poster about evolutionary models of aneuploidy at Genetics, Genomics & Evolution conference, Sep 24, 2019 at Tel Aviv University.
• Yoav's talk about evolution of non-vertical transmission at a workshop on Socio-Technological Evolution of the Human Species (Sep 24, 2019) is available on YouTube.
• NVIDIA has decided to support us with a gift of a Titan V GPU.
• The ISF has accepted our grant proposal on the role of aneuploidy in adaptive evolution!
• The Society for the Study of Evolution has a New Faculty Profile on Yoav.
• Predicting microbial relative growth in a mixed culture from growth curve data is now published in PNAS: this is the result of a long collaboration with Eynat Dellus-Gur, Maayan Bibi, Uri Obolski, Judith Berman and Lilach Hadany from Tel Aviv University, Marc Feldman from Stanford University, and Kedar Karkare and Tim Cooper from the University of Houston.
• A new paper on evolution of stress-induced mutation with horizontal gene transfer is now published on The American Naturalist.
• Yoav presented our work at the Molecular Mechanisms in Evolution Gordon Research Conference.
• AWS has decided to award us with Cloud Credits for Research!
• 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 it 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.