Academic Editors
The following people constitute the Editorial Board of Academic Editors for PeerJ. These active academics are the Editors who seek peer reviewers, evaluate their responses, and make editorial decisions on each submission to the journal. Learn more about becoming an Editor.
Peter R Girguis
Peter Girguis joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 2005, becoming full professor in 2012. His research efforts are aimed at better understanding how microbes mediate matter and energy flow through Earth’s biosphere. He develops novel methods and technologies for studying microbially-mediated energy flow and harvesting, including laboratory and in situ incubators that better mimic environmental conditions, and field-deployable instruments such as underwater mass spectrometers, carbon isotope analyzers and high-performance hydrogen sensors that allow him to study microbial processes in the lab and in situ.
Girguis has authored or co-authored over 85 publications, including papers in Nature, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Girguis is a board member of the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET), is on Schmidt Ocean Institute vehicle advisory boards, and served as chair of the National Science Foundations’ Deep Submergence Science Committee (DeSSC).
Girguis’ honors include 5 consecutive years of commendations for distinguished teaching, the 2007 and 2011 Lindbergh Foundation Award for Science & Sustainability, a 2010 Honorable mention in the ENI International Energy and the Environment Award, a feature in the 2008 Discover Magazine’s “10 Everyday Technologies That Can Change the World” (bio-powered lights), and a 2008 Honorable Mention in the Buckminster Fuller Innovations in Science Award.
Robert J Hijmans
Robert Hijmans is a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining UC Davis, he held positions at the International Potato Center (Peru), the International Rice Research Institute (Philippines) and at the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. His research focuses on spatial data analysis in biodiversity, agriculture, and health, and he has developed widely used software and databases to support such work. He has a PhD in Production Ecology from Wageningen University (Netherlands).
Bernhard Wernly
Dr Bernhard Wernly is a Physician-scientist at the Paracelsus Medical University, Salzberg, Austria. He is trained in cardiology and intensive care medicine, MD, PhD and currently doing a Master in Public Health.
Pedro G Ferreira
Pedro G. Ferreira graduated in Systems and Informatics Engineering from the University of Minho in 2002 and obtained his Ph. D. in Artificial Intelligence from the same University in 2007. From 2008 to 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Bioinformatics and Genomics Laboratory, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow the Functional Population Genomics and Genetics of Complex Traits group, School of Medicine, University of Geneva. He has been involved in several large international consortia including: ICGC-CLL, ENCODE, GEUVADIS, SYSCOL and GTEx. He published several papers in high impact journals, including the multidisciplinary journals: Nature, Science, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, PNAS and eLife. Other papers have been published in high impact specialized journals including Genome Biology, Genome Research, American Journal of Human Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, RNA or Leukemia. He is the author of 3 book chapters and 2 books. He has an h-index of 31, with a total > 32 000 citations. In 2015, he was awarded an FCT Investigator Starting grant and he joined Ipatimup/i3s. He was awrded the Research Award 2015 and 2019 from Portuguese Society of Human Genetics - SPGH and the Microsoft Azure Research Award for Data Science 2017. He is a partner in a bioinformatics data analysis company with national and international clients, including hospitals, diagnostic clinics and research centres. From 2015 to 2018, he was an invited assistant professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of Minho, where he taught bioinformatics and data analysis at master's level. He has been involved in the final supervision of 1 postdoctoral fellow, 2 PhD students, 22 Masters students and 3 research assistants, and in the ongoing (main and co-) supervision of 5 PhD students and 5 Masters students. He was the director of the Masters and Specialisation in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2020-2023). He has experience in the genomics start-up environment, where he developed information systems for personal genomics data interpretation. He is currently an Assistant Professor (since 02/2019) with Habilitation (since 10/2022) at Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto and a Senior Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Group at INESCTEC. He is currently the Director of the Bachelor in Bioinformatics and Adjunct Director of the Bachelor in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. His main research focus is on developing methods for a variety of problems in genomic data science. In particular, he is interested in unravelling the role of genomics in human health and disease. To achieve this goal, he applies and develops data analysis models using machine learning and probabilistic methods to analyse and interpret diverse, complex and large-scale genomic datasets.
Venkata Yellapantula
Bioinformatician currently at Memorial Loan Kettering Cancer Center with 10 years of experience in analyzing high-throughput genomic and proteomic data. I have a diverse background in handling raw exome & whole genome sequencing, RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq data to identify genetic aberrations. Proficient in development and implementing pipelines and algorithms and post analysis of aberrations identified through individual assays to glean novel biological patterns. Led large-scalegenomic efforts such as MMRF CoMMpass trial, ICGC & TCGA.
Scott Emrich
I received a BS in Biology and Computer Science from Loyola College in Maryland and a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Iowa State University (ISU). Upon graduation, I received a ISU Research Excellence award and the university-wide Zaffrano Prize for Graduate Research. Starting after graduation in 2007 I spent the first ten years of my career at the University of Notre Dame, and now am an Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). My research interests include genome-focused bioinformatics, parallel and distributed computing, and the intersection of biological applications and second and third-gen sequencing. Nearly all of my research has been funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).
Melissa J Davis
Associate Professor Melissa Davis is a computational biologist and Laboratory Head in the Bioinformatics Division of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Her background is in genetics and computational cell biology with expertise in the analysis of genome-scale molecular networks, systems biology, and knowledge-based modelling of regulatory networks.
In 2014, Melissa was awarded a four year National Breast Cancer Foundation Career Development Fellowship, and took up a position as Senior Research Fellow in Computational Systems Biology at the University of Melbourne, before moving to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research as a Laboratory Head in 2016. Melissa specialises in the integration of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data with knowledge-based network models to understand the regulatory logic of mammalian systems.
Rendong Yang
Dr. Yang is an assistant professor and section leader for cancer genomics at the Hormel Institute. Dr. Yang obtained his PhD in the China Agricultural University, where his work involved the topic of microarray data analysis. Briefly he developed two statistical models, called ARSER and LSPR, to detect periodically expressed transcripts from evenly or unevenly sampled temporal microarray gene expression profiles respectively. By applying these algorithms to Arabidopsis and rice transcriptome, a list of novel clock-controlled genes that regulating plant circadian rhythm were identified. Dr. Yang finished his postdoctoral training at Emory University, where his research switched to cancer genomics and epigenomics. Working with researchers in Winship Cancer Institute, he developed a bioinformatics pipeline to analyze the whole genome mate-pair and pair-end sequencing and RNA-seq data from three tumor cells in multiple myeloma, which leads to discovering a novel SPI-ZNF287 t(11;17) translocation. After postdoctoral training, Dr. Yang joined Supercomputing Institute at University of Minnesota as a Bioinformatics Analyst working on both clinical genomics and prostate cancer research to define and characterize AR gene rearrangements from DNA-seq data, and also to interrogate genome-wide binding profiles of AR and AR variants in prostate cancer cells and tissues.
Arnold Rakaj
Dr. Arnold Rakaj works at the Laboratory of Experimental Ecology and Aquaculture at the University of Rome Tor Vergata where is carrying out basic and applied research on marine invertebrates and their role in the benthic dynamics.
Robert H McDonald
Robert H. McDonald is Dean of University Libraries and Professor of Library Administration. He is responsible for leading the Boulder campus library system in fulfilling their mission to inspire learning, research, and discovery by connecting knowledge, information, and people.
His expertise and interests include teaching and learning technologies that enable libraries to better support researchers at all levels, open source software development, scholarly communications, and new model publishing. Robert has also been an active proponent of diversity initiatives in libraries throughout his career and is committed to creating library spaces that are welcoming, diverse and inclusive for all of our Library users.
Francesco Russo
I am a molecular and cellular biologist with a long experience in non-coding RNAs (in particular microRNAs). My main interest is about computational biology. Currently, I am a member of the Brunak lab at the NNF Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen and I'm also an affiliated member of the Computational Biology Lab at the Danish Cancer Society in Papaleo lab. I am working on data integration of omics data, electronic patients records, analysis of laboratory tests and drug effects in cancer patients.
I am also interested in non-invasive biomarkes. In 2012 I designed and developed the miRandola database (https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/46/D1/D354/4191335), the first extracellular circulating microRNA database.
Barbara P Chan
Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering at The University of Hong Kong.