He is the recipient of many scientific awards including a Hutch-wide mentoring award. His work has received significant accolades for him and his lab members, many of whom hold prestigious academic appointments today. He and Steve Henikoff proposed that unusual genetic conflicts during meiosis drive the unexpectedly rapid evolution of centromeric DNA and proteins, which in turn may provide a basis of postzygotic reproductive isolation between recently diverged species.

A significant area of research in the Malik lab is the study of rapid evolution in genes involved in essential cellular processes such as chromosome segregation.

For example, his lab has been able to describe functional outcomes of ancient host-virus arms races by resurrecting both host and viral proteins from the evolutionary record. He is interested in understanding these “molecular arms races” and how they drive recurrent genetic innovation, from the perspectives of both evolutionary biology and disease. His lab studies the causes and consequences of genetic conflicts that take place between different genomes (e.g., host-virus interactions, mitochondrial conflicts with nuclear genomes) or between components of the same genome (e.g., chromosomal competition at centromeric regions).

He has focused on Drosophila research for practically his whole career, from his PhD with Tom Eickbush at the University of Rochester, to his postdoc with Steve Henikoff at the Hutch, to his independent lab. Harmit Singh Malik is a Full Professor and HHMI Investigator in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (“the Hutch”).

Drosophila labs in canada