New Undergrads Join

We’re incredibly excited to be joined in the Reilly lab by two amazing Yale undergrads, Madeline and Debbie. They will be pushing at the forefront of genomics this summer full time in lab. Madeline will engineer evolutionary adaptive variants into new cell lines while Debbie will deploy functional prediction method to the scale of entire adaptive haplotypes. Read more about them below or check out our whole team.

Debbie Lilly YC ‘26

Debbie is an undergraduate student from the Boston area. She is hoping to major in computer science and MCDB, and she is interested in the application of computational tools for analyzing complex genetic data and human evolution. At the Reilly Lab, Debbie will be working with Stephen to investigate targets of local adaptation across human populations. At Yale, she is part of The Record, Code Haven, Yale Computer Society, and the women’s ultimate frisbee team. She spends her free time crocheting, hiking, biking, camping, and wishing she had a cat!

Madeline is a first-year undergraduate researcher at the Reilly Lab from Biloxi, Mississippi. At Yale, she currently plans on completing a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. She hopes to later attend graduate school to study genetics and pursue a career in biomedical research. In the lab, Madeline is working to characterize an adaptive variant in the 3’UTR region of the LEPR gene that appears to be involved with various evolutionary-linked traits, such as cold adaptation, obesity, and immunological functions. Outside of the lab, Madeline spends time going on runs around New Haven with the Club Running Team, volunteering at the Yale Community Kitchen, practicing piano with the Yale Jazz Collective, and working at the Chemistry Teaching Laboratories. She also enjoys reading, marathoning movies with friends, collecting vinyl, and spending way too much time making Spotify playlists.

Madeline Pitre YC ‘26