NC State Geneticist Receives NSF CAREER Award

Nadia Singh, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at NC State, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, also known as the NSF CAREER award, is one of the highest awards the foundation bestows upon young faculty in the sciences.

The five-year award will support Singh’s research project entitled “The Evolution of Fine-Scale Recombination Landscapes.” The project will examine variation in the frequency and chromosomal region of meiotic recombination events, the process by which genetic information is exchanged between paired chromosomes during gamete formation. If recombination goes awry, gametes can be formed with missing or extra copies of chromosomes. In humans, having the incorrect number of chromosomes is associated with fetal loss, mental impairment and developmental disabilities.

Singh and her team will use a combination of classical genetics and next-generation sequencing to determine the nature, extent and genetic basis of variation in the distribution of meiotic recombination events along a chromosome. They will use computer simulations to determine the consequences of this spatial variation in the distribution of recombination events for patterns of genetic variation within and between species, as well as bioinformatics approaches to determine how crossover distribution changes in response to natural selection.

The project will also include opportunities to educate the public and share recombination data.

Singh received her Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University in 2006 and her B.A. in biology from Harvard University in 1999.