Rohan Mehta
Dr. Rohan Mehta is an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist who uses mathematical models to study the fundamental rules of life and how different living systems interact. He has worked on organisms from the tiny (how different genes in Staphylococcus aureus evolve with each other) to the human (how human behavior affects the spread of disease and vice versa) to the entirely theoretical (how cooperation between individuals can evolve).
Dr. Mehta earned his Ph.D. in 2019 from Stanford University, where his thesis was titled “Mathematical Modeling of Biological and Cultural Traits”. He then worked for five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University before joining the faculty at Elmhurst University in 2023, with a focus on bioinformatics and computational biology.
- BIO 200 General Biology I
- BIO 201 General Biology II
- BIO 315 Genetics
LM Båvik*, RS Mehta*, and DB Weissman. “Fifty shades of greenbeard: robust evolution of altruism based on similarity of complex phenotypes.” Proc Roy Soc B Biol Sci 290(2000) (2023):1-8
RS Mehta, RA Petit III, TD Read, and DB Weissman. “Detecting patterns of accessory genome coevolution in Staphylococcus aureus using data from thousands of bacterial genomes.” BMC Bioinformatics 24 (2023):243
RS Mehta, M Steel, and NA Rosenberg. “The probability of joint monophyly of samples of gene lineages for all species in an arbitrary species tree.” J Comp Biol 29(7) (2022):679-703.
RS Mehta and JA Kraus. “Eco-evolutionary dynamics of autotomy.” Theor Ecol (2021).
RS Mehta and NA Rosenberg. “Modelling anti-vaccine sentiment as a cultural pathogen.” Evol Hum Sci 2 (2020): E21
RS Mehta, AF Feder, SM Boca, and NA Rosenberg. “The relationship between haplotype-based FST and haplotype length.” Genetics 213.1 (2019): 281-295
DE LaScala-Gruenewald, RS Mehta, Y Liu, and MW Denny. “Sensory perception plays a larger role in foraging efficiency than heavy-tailed movement strategies.” Ecol Mod 404 (2019): 69-82.
RS Mehta and NA Rosenberg. “The probability of reciprocal monophyly of gene lineages in three and four species.” Theor Popul Biol 129 (2019): 133-147
RS Mehta, D Bryant, and NA Rosenberg. “The probability of monophyly of a sample of gene lineages on a species tree.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 113.29 (2016): 8002-8009.