About the Board of Editors
Senior Editors
DAVID BALTRUS, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Biology in the School of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona. His primary research interests are in the evolution and diversification of plant-associated bacteria, specifically those of the Pseudomonas genus. He uses a combination of genetics and genomics in his research. More
VINCENT BRUNO, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and part of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His primary research interests are in the interaction between pathogenic fungi (Candida, Mucorales, and Aspergillus) and the host. He uses a combination of transcriptomics, genomic tools, and molecular biology to investigate how fungi invade and proliferate during host infection. More
CHRISTINA CUOMO, Ph.D., is a Senior Group Leader in Fungal Genomics in the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University. Her work leverages advances in sequencing technologies and laboratory methods to study fungal pathogen populations, communities, and single cells. Her primary research interest is the study of human fungal pathogens and their interactions with the host using genomic and transcriptomic approaches. More
JOHN DENNEHY, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Biology Department at Queens College in New York. He is interested in the ecology and evolution of bacteriophages. Dr. Dennehy uses mathematical modeling and experiments to understand how bacteriophages compete with each other, interact with their hosts, and adapt to changing environments. More
JULIE DUNNING HOTOPP, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Genome Science and in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her primary research interests are in bioinformatics and genomics, and she has focused specifically on the identification of lateral gene transfers between bacteria and eukaryotes. More
STEVEN R. GILL, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and Director of the University of Rochester Genomics Research Center. His primary research interests are in microbial pathogenesis and evolution focused on Staphylococcus aureus and related species. He also studies the human microbiome, with a current focus on the early-life gut, respiratory, and oral communities. Among other techniques, he uses genomic sequencing, metatranscriptomics, and metagenomics in his research. More
KAREN LLOYD, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She integrates geomicrobiology, molecular biology, and geochemistry to determine how microorganisms influence marine biogeochemical cycles. As her research focuses on unculturable, environmental microbes, specifically in subseafloor ecosystems, she uses a combination of metabolomics, metagenomics and metatranscriptomics, and geochemistry to query the metabolism of microorganisms living in these extreme environments. More
JULIA MARESCA, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Delaware. She uses sequencing, bacterial genetics, and physiology to examine microbial responses to environmental inputs. Her research focuses on environmental microbes, and she uses a combination of genomics and physiological assays to ask fundamental questions about microbial metabolism. More
JELLE MATTHIJNSSENS, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor (BOF/ZAP) at the KU Leuven since 2015 in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Head of the Laboratory of Viral Metagenomics. He is chairman of the Rotavirus Classification Working Group and the Reoviridae Study Group of the ICTV and part of the editorial board of Scientific Reports. He is a coauthor of 133 papers in PubMed, has an h-index of 33, and was cited more than 5,000 times according to Web of Science. His research focuses on the viral component of the microbiome, "the virome," using shotgun-based metagenomics approaches. A sample treatment procedure to efficiently purify viral particles for viral metagenomics was fully optimized and is now being applied in various studies on (i) the gut virome/microbiome recruitment dynamics during the first year of life of healthy infants, (ii) the role of the gut virome in human diseases such as IBD and various liver disorders, (iii) the risk of zoonotic bat viruses to cause gastroenteritis in humans in Cameroon, (iv) the identification of known and novel mosquito-borne arboviruses, and (v) the role of the honeybee (Apis mellifera) virome in winter loss. More
CATHERINE PUTONTI, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Biology, Computer Science, and Microbiology and Immunology at Loyola University Chicago. Her primary research interests are in bacteriophage ecology, evolution, and genomics, investigating complex communities from the natural environment to the human microbiome. She uses a combination of computational and molecular methods in her research. More
DAVID RASKO, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and part of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His primary research interests are in genomics and bioinformatics of bacteria interacting with the host. His research involves comparative and functional genomics of human pathogens, as well as microbiome, metagenome, and metatranscriptome studies of host-pathogen interactions. More
ANTONIS ROKAS, Ph.D., is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in Biological Sciences and a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Crete, Greece (1998), and his Ph.D. from Edinburgh University, Scotland (2001). Prior to joining Vanderbilt in the summer of 2007, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2002 to 2005), and a research scientist at the Broad Institute (2005 to 2007). Research in the Rokas lab focuses on the study of the DNA record to gain insight into the patterns and processes of evolution. Through a combination of computational and experimental approaches, Dr. Rokas’ current research aims to understand the molecular foundations of the fungal lifestyle, the reconstruction of the tree of life, and the evolution of human pregnancy. More
JASON STAJICH, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology at the University of California, Riverside. His primary research interest is in the study of evolution of fungi using genomic and comparative approaches. A significant portion of his research effort also involves bioinformatics and software development made freely available on Github. More
FRANK STEWART, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His primary research interests are in biogeochemical cycling in environmental microbes, specifically in marine environments, although he has also continued to work in host-symbiont systems. He uses environmental genomics and biogeochemistry in his research. More
J. CAMERON THRASH, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Marine and Environmental Biology section at the University of Southern California. His primary research interests are in environmental microbiology and microbial ecology in aquatic environments. He uses a variety of approaches to understand microbial functions in the environment, including cultivation and comparative genomics, physiology, and meta-omics techniques. More