Rate My Professor Brian Verrelli

Throughout his career at Virginia Commonwealth University, Verrelli advanced from associate professor in the Center for Biological Data Science to full professor. He has contributed key insights into genetic adaptation amid urbanization, human evolutionary history, color vision variation, and commensal pest dynamics. Notable publications include "Signatures of Selection and Gene Conversion Associated with Human Color Vision Variation" (2004, American Journal of Human Genetics), "Evidence for Balancing Selection from Nucleotide Sequence Analyses of Human G6PD" (2002, American Journal of Human Genetics), "Urban hubs of connectivity: contrasting patterns of gene flow within and among cities in the western black widow spider" (2018, Proceedings of the Royal Society B), "Evolutionary Genetic Signatures of Selection on Bone-Related Variation within Human and Chimpanzee Populations" (2022, Genes), and "Were bed bugs the first urban pest insect? Genome-wide patterns of bed bug demography mirror global human expansion" (2025, Biology Letters). Verrelli co-authored influential perspectives such as "A roadmap for urban evolutionary ecology" and oversaw studies identifying trends in biological impacts of urbanization. In 2025, he received the National/International Recognition Award from VCU's College of Humanities and Sciences for his scholarly achievements. His research on bedbug evolution linked to human urbanization and black widow spider gene flow has advanced urban evolutionary ecology and appeared in media outlets.