Rate My Professor Kirk Lohmueller

Kirk Lohmueller is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Human Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he joined the faculty in 2013 as an Assistant Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, added an appointment in Human Genetics in 2015, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, and to full Professor in 2022. He earned his Ph.D. in Genetics from Cornell University in 2010 under advisors Andy Clark and Carlos Bustamante, focusing on human population genetics, demography, and natural selection, and his B.S. in Biology magna cum laude from Georgetown University in 2005. Lohmueller completed a Miller Research Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley from 2010 to 2013, working with Rasmus Nielsen on analyses of next-generation sequencing data.

His research develops and implements statistical methods to study genetic variation in humans and other species, with a primary focus on population genetic questions including natural selection—particularly negative selection removing deleterious mutations—inference of population history, conservation genetics, medical genetics, and forensic applications. Key areas include inbreeding depression and extinction risk in endangered species such as the vaquita and Florida panthers, adaptive introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans, dominance models for nonsynonymous mutations, and genomic simulations. Lohmueller has received the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), Searle Scholar Award (2014), UCLA Hellman Fellowship (2015), and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Faculty Teaching Award (2019). With over 16,000 citations and an h-index of 49, his influential publications include "The critically endangered vaquita is not doomed to extinction by inbreeding depression" (Science, 2022), "Strongly deleterious mutations are a primary determinant of extinction risk due to inbreeding depression" (Evolution Letters, 2021), "Determining the factors driving selective effects of new nonsynonymous mutations" (PNAS, 2017), and "Deleterious variation shapes the genomic landscape of introgression" (PLoS Genetics, 2018). He teaches courses such as Population Genetics (EE BIOL 135/235) and Advanced Statistics in Ecology and Evolution, and has held roles including Vice Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (2021-2022).