![](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2019/09/Andy-Clark-200x200-150x150.jpg)
Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics
227 Biotechnology Bldg, 526 Campus Rd, Ithaca NY 14853-2703
Contact Andy at: ac347(at)cornell.edu
Phone: 607-255-0527 Fax: 607-255-6249
Research Associates/Sr. Research Associates
![photo of Elissa Cosgrove](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2019/09/Elissa-Cosgrove2018-160x165-993x1024.jpg)
Elissa joined the Clark Lab in September 2014 as a Research Associate. Before joining the Clark Lab, she completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, and then worked at Amgen as a Bioinformatics Scientist in Oncology Lead Discovery. She conducts computational analysis for several ongoing projects in the lab, and provides general computational support for group members. She is an enthusiastic R user.
Contact Elissa at: ejc87(at)cornell.edu
![Photo of Yassi Hafezi](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2019/08/yassi3-1irqotb-150x150.jpg)
Yassi joined the Clark lab in April, 2016 and is broadly interested in reproductive biology and fitness. She is currently working to understand the function and evolution of genes on the Y chromosome in Drosophila, which serve as a model for how and why many important genes across species carry out important functions from regions of the genome that are epigenetically silenced in all cells. She uses CRISPR genome editing and the myriad of advanced genetic tools available in Drosophila melanogaster. She earned her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from U.C. Berkeley in 2011. Her past research was on mechanisms that regulate tissue and cellular growth and cell competition in the Drosophila ovary and larval imaginal discs.
Contact Yassi at: yhafezi(at)gmail.com
Post Docs
![photo of Jolie Carlisle](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2023/03/Jolie_Carlisle_Headshot-150x150.jpg)
Jolie completed her B.S. in Microbiology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 and went on to complete a Ph.D. in Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in 2021. During her Ph.D. she was advised by Dr. Willie Swanson and investigated the evolution and function of fertilization genes. Specifically, she biochemically characterized how the rapid divergence of interacting sperm and egg fertilization proteins leads to species-specific gamete recognition in the model organism abalone. She joined the Clark and Wolfner Labs in 2022 where she is investing male-female molecular interactions mediating reproduction in Drosophila. Specifically, she is investigating how genetic variation in D. melanogaster females affects female mating plug ejection timing and is investigating the evolution and function of male and female mating plug proteins.
Contact Jolie at: jac655(at)cornell.edu
![Photo of postdoc Arielle Fogel](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2023/02/Arielle-Fogel-150x150.jpeg)
Arielle received her B.A. in Biology (Concentration in Ecology and Evolution) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 and her Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics from Duke University in 2022. She is fascinated by the evolution and diversity of social behavior across animal species and broadly interested in how evolutionary processes influence social behavior and reciprocally, how social behavior influences evolutionary processes. To tackle these questions, Arielle integrates lab, field, and computational methods to understand the dynamics between behavior, genomes, and evolutionary processes in natural populations. Her graduate research approached these questions in a wild population of hybrid baboons. She joined the Clark Lab in 2023 and is currently focusing on a wide range of topics including pedigree inference, demography, hybridization, and sperm competition in wild equids.
Contact Arielle at asf224(at)cornell.edu, check out her website, or follow her on Twitter.
Graduate Students
![photo of Katelyn Boese](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2024/04/Katelyn-Boese-0a57ff8b039eb8ed-150x150.jpeg)
Katelyn grew up in Grand Forks, ND and then moved to Philadelphia, PA to complete her bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where she double majored in Molecular & Cell Biology and Classical Studies. During that time, she worked in Michael Lampson’s lab studying epigenetic inheritance and evolution of centromere proteins. As a GGD student at Cornell, she is co-advised by Cedric Feschotte and Andy Clark. She is broadly interested in how rapidly evolving genetic elements can shape conserved, essential processes. Her current research combines developmental genetics and evolutionary genomics to test the role of transposable elements in Drosophila development and learn more broadly about the dynamics of conflict and cooperation between transposons and their host genome. Contact Katelyn at kgb54(at)cornell.edu
![Graduate student You Chen](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2022/09/You-Chen-9-2022-e1664564204364-150x150.jpg)
You is a PhD student in the field of Genetics, Genomics, and Development and is co-advised by Dr. Haiyuan Yu. She did her undergraduate at Zhejiang University majoring in Clinical Medicine. She earned a master degree in Neurology at ZJU, focusing on the identification of causative genes for movement disorders and hereditary neurological diseases. She is broadly interested in the genetic basis of human diseases, regulatory genome, and population genetics. Her current research focuses on the evolution and architecture of transcriptional regulatory elements to unravel how they encode intricate programs of gene expression in normal and disease states.
Contact You at: yc2553(at)cornell.edu
![photo of Mitch Lokey](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2019/09/MitchLokey160x165-150x150.jpeg)
Mitch has a great interest in all things evolutionary. During his undergraduate at the University of Utah he worked in an anthropological population genetics lab estimating timing and rate of archaic admixture, graduated 2016. After undergraduate he steered more molecular and studied gene regulatory effects and selection of transposable elements at the Eccles Institute of Human Genetics. Fall 2018 Mitch joined the Genetics, Genomics, & Development field at Cornell and entered the labs of Profs Andy Clark and Philipp Messer Summer 2019. His current research interests lie at the interface of evolution and disease. By studying how segregating variants in the human population affect the interactome and modeling the evolutionary dynamics of such variants he hopes to help strengthen our understanding of the effects of deleterious variants.
Contact Mitch at: mitch.lok3(at)gmail.com
![Ben McCormick](https://blogs.cornell.edu/andyclarklab/files/2024/04/BenMcCormick-dde4b0859f1fde9e-150x150.png)
Ben is a PhD student in the field of Genetics, Genomics and Development (GGD) co-advised with Dan Barbash. He graduated in 2021 from Reed College, where his undergraduate thesis focused on improving species concept for members of Entoloma subgenus Leptonia, a rare and poorly studied group of mushroom-forming fungi. After graduation, he came to Cornell to work as a research technician in the Barbash lab, where he used Drosophila to examine mechanisms underlying hybrid incompatibilities and develop methods to screen for evidence of meiotic drive in natural populations. In Spring 2024, Ben joined the Barbash and Clark labs, where he plans to study the mechanisms and population dynamics of drive and suppression using a mix genetic, molecular biology, and computational approaches.
Contact Ben at: bm545(at)cornell.edu