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.
Conor P O'Byrne
Director of the Bacterial Stress Response Group, Senior lecturer in Microbiology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The research focus in my group is on the molecular mechanisms that food-borne bacterial pathogens use to sense and respond to harsh conditions in their environment. Pathogens encounter major physicochemical changes as they transition from food into the host, particularly in relation to pH, osmolarity, oxygen concentration, light and temperature. Understanding how pathogenic bacteria detect and respond to these changes is critical if we are to devise sensible strategies to prevent their entry into the food chain and to prevent infections from arising in the human population. In my laboratory we study two important food-borne pathogens, Listeria monocytogenes and Escherichia coli.
Heriberto Rodriguez-Martinez
Professor of Reproductive Biology at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Director of the Centre of Biomedical Resources at the University of Linköping, Sweden. DVM, MSc, PhD; Professor of Reproductive Biotechnology, SLU 1991, Founding Diplomate of the European College of Animal Reproduction (ECAR, 1999). Editor-in-Chief of Reproduction in Domestic Animals (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).
Carlo Ennio Pucillo
Carlo Pucillo is a Full Professor in Immunology at the School of Medicine of the University of Udine.
In his scientific career Prof. Carlo Pucillo has studied the "non canonical function" of MHC class II and the molecular mechanism that regulate the B cell activation and differentiation. From 2-1991 to 6-1994 Dr Pucillo has been Visiting Scientist at NCI in Bethesda, MD-USA.
He has acquired a considerable expertise in advanced molecular biology analysis as well as a good understanding of the immunobiology of the immune response, of the non canonical function of MHC class II molecules, in particular, as documented by his publications on this subjects.
He has also investigated the signal transduction pathways elicited by T-B cell interaction via CD40-CD154. CD40 is a B cell surface receptor that belongs to the pleiotropic tumor necrosis factor receptor (TNFR) superfamily. The interaction between CD40 and its ligand promotes proliferation, cytokine production, upregulation of various surface molecules involved in antigen presentation, germinal center and memory B cell formation antibody isotype switching and affinity maturation and the B cell life span.
Most recently, his interest is in the study of regulatory role of Mast Cells in the microenvironment and subsequently in the tissutal tolerance and adaptive immune response. This body of work may provide a conceptual framework to therapeutically manipulate these responses in the settings of autoimmune disease and cancer.
Ranjit Vijayan
Dr. Ranjit Vijayan obtained his PhD in Life Sciences Interface/Biochemistry from the University of Oxford, UK, and his DipGrad in Management from the London School of Economics & Political Science, University of London, UK. In 2004 Dr Vijayan obtained his MSc in Computer Science from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, and prior to this his BEng in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Dr. Vijayan's research interests include; molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules, protein structure modeling, structure based drug discovery, genomics & transcriptomics, pharmacogenomics and high-performance computing.
Rita Grandori
Professor of Biochemistry at the Department of Biotechnology and Biosciences, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy. Adjunct Professor of Protein Science at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria.
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.
Darren W Williams
Group Leader and Reader at King's College London. My research focuses on the mechanisms that control the assembly of neural networks. I have explored how network components are generated from distinct neural precursors, how axons and dendrites are guided to their targets and the way dendrites undergo large-scale pruning. Although my lab uses Drosophila, my experience with zebrafish and teaching human neuroanatomy to medical students broadly influences the questions I ask.
Anissa Daliry
Dr. Anissa Daliry is a biologist at the Federal College of Pernambuco (UFPE) and holds a master's degree and a PhD in cellular and molecular biology from FIOCRUZ and a postdoctoral degree from Biophysics/UFRJ. Dr. Anissa is a permanent professor of Cell and Molecular Biology program, IOC/FIOCRUZ (level 7/ CAPES) and young scientist of our state/FAPERJ (2021-2024). Her main research focus is to study molecular, physiological pathways and mechanisms involved in the development of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and Chagas disease. She performs pre-clinical and clinical studies. She coordinates the postgraduate course "Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases: from bench to the bedside." She is a reviewer for 13 indexed international journals. Since 2020, she has collaborated in the Longitudinal Study of Brazilian Health, ELSA-BRASIL. She is also a member of the Liver Center and the Brazilian Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (SBFte). She develops projects in technological innovation with the development of a medical device for the quantification of hepatic steatosis. Dr. Anissa is a member of the research directory group entitled: Longitudinal Study of Adult Health - RJ/Fiocruz Research Center, coordinated by Dr. Rosane Griep/IOC and leader of the CNPq research group entitled: Study group on pathophysiology and therapy of chronic non-communicable and infectious diseases.
Louise Willemen
Department of Natural Resources, Faculty of Geo-Information and Earth Observation, of University of Twente, the Netherlands.PhD in spatial modelling from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.Worked before @ Bioversity International in Colombia, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy, Cornell University in the USA.Current roles: Coordinating Lead Author of the Land Degradation and Restoration assessment of IPBES, Chair of the Steering Committee of Ecosystem Services Partnership, and editorial work for several journals. Ecosystem services and rural development researcher. Current research includes RS-based ecosystem service mapping and monitoring, impact assessments of integrated restoration, and prioritization of investments in land degradation neutrality actions.
Paweł M Bęczkowski
Pawel received his DVM from Lublin University of Life Sciences, Poland in 2008. He also holds a Wellcome Trust PhD from the University of Glasgow. His research has focused on virus evolution in the progression of natural feline immunodeficiency virus infection. Pawel also is a practitioner and an EBVS European and Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons Recognised Specialist in Small Animal Internal Medicine.
Dr Beczkowski has a broad interest in small animal internal medicine, companion animal virology, virus discovery, and cross-species transmission. His particular interest lies in the evolution of virus-host interactions with a view to pair it with clinical applications for the diagnosis, preventive strategies and treatment of viral diseases.
Takashi Funatsu
Takashi Funatsu received his BS, MS and PhD degrees from Waseda University in 1982, 1984 and 1988, respectively. He was an associate professor at Waseda University in 1997. Since 2004, he has been a professor of Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo. His research interests are (1) Elucidating the molecular mechanism of bio-molecular machine, such as a molecular chaperonin, (2) Single molecule imaging of processing and transport of mRNA in a living cell, and (3) Development of micro/nano devices to analyze bio-molecular interactions.
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.