Yuya Karita

Postdoc
Background

I have been interested in how individual-level behaviors, such as phenotypic change and local interactions, impact population dynamics, ultimately, evolution. While being an experimentalist, I also love to combine theoretical and computational approaches to understand biological dynamics.
I was trained as a physicist at University of Tokyo, Japan. While working on experimental soft matter physics, I also experienced bioengineering MEMS technique in Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).
After completing my bachelor, I started my Ph.D. research at University of California, Berkeley, USA, with Prof. Oskar Hallatschek. During my Ph.D., I investigated microbial ecological and evolutionary dynamics in spatial structure using microfluidics. I found the characteristic transition of bacterial population densities, and analyzed the dynamics with reaction-diffusion models.
In my postdoc at the MPI for Evolutionary Biology, I work on the physical and ecological basis of bacterial aggregation and its evolutionary consequence.

Research interests

Microbial ecology and evolution. Collective dynamics. Mathematical modeling.

Scroll to Top