Haoran Cai

I am an evolutionary geneticist and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, where I work with Karen Sears. I develop theory and computational methods, grounded in genomic and phenotypic data, to understand how genotype–phenotype maps structure genetic variation and what the resulting genetic architecture reveals about natural selection.

I received my Ph.D. from MIT, where I worked in the Des Marais Lab. I received my B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), during which I was advised by Ping Ao. I was a visiting undergraduate student at Harvard Medical School in Hormoz Lab. I also visited CEFE at CNRS with Luis-Miguel Chevin in 2024.