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.
Matthew PG Barnett
I'm currently a Senior Research Scientist in the Physiology & Health Team at AgResearch Limited, one of New Zealand's Crown Research Institutes (CRIs). I'm based at the University of Auckland's Liggins Institute, being involved in several projects investigating the importance of nutrition for health throughout life. The primary focus of these projects is intestinal health, but I'm also interested other aspects of human health, including cognition and mobility.
I graduated from The University of Auckland in May 2005 with a PhD in Biological Sciences. My thesis research focused on the importance of a mother’s diet during gestation and lactation on the risk of type-2 diabetes in her offspring. Since 2001 I've worked for AgResearch in a range of roles (including Research Associate, FRST Postdoctoral Fellow, and Research Scientist) and on a variety of topics. I was part of the Nutrigenomics New Zealand collaboration from 2004-2014, working on understanding how our diet and genome interact to influence health with a particular focus on intestinal function.
I was the Section Editor (Nutrigenomics) for the European Journal of Nutrition from 2014 to 2019.
Anurag N Paranjape
Passionate about understanding the mechanisms governing cancer metastasis with a hope of finding new targetable pathways. Have worked on breast cancer stem cells, EMT, prostate cancer stem cells, breast cancer brain metastasis, and blood-brain barriers.
Ana Grande-Pérez
PhD in Biology (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) in 1998. Posdoctoral researcher (1999-2004) with Prof. Pedro R Lowenstein at the University of Manchester (UK) and Dr. Esteban Domingo at Centro de Biologia Molecular "Severo Ochoa" (Madrid, Spain). She is currently Associate Professor of Genetics and researcher of the IHSM-UMA-CSIC. Her research interests are the study of virus evolution and new antiviral strategies. She is also interested in the analysis of the genetic variability of RNA and ssDNA plant viruses.
Priyanka Banerjee
Dr. Priyanka Banerjee earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry (Molecular Biology) from India. She has more than 15 years of experience in Molecular Biology, Cancer biology, and is currently working working on metastatic cancer progression, cellular crosstalk in tumor microenvironment in her role as postdoctoral research associate in US lab.
Dr. Banerjee has extensive experience reviewing for multiple journals (more than 25 journals), and has published her own work in peer reviewed journals, including, Cancer Immunology Research, Redox Biology, Scientific Reports, Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Clinical Microbiology and Infection etc.
Dezső Módos
I am a medical doctor and a systems biologist. During my scientific carrier, I have tried to understand diseases and find novel approaches to treat them with drugs, whether it is cancer or UC. I finished the Semmelweis University Doctor of Medicine course on 2012 and then started my PhD in network biology. I was involved in developing multiple biological network databases transcription factor-target layers such as SignaLink, AutophagyRegulatory Network or the NRF2Ome. My main project was to understand signalling networks in cancer and how the different paralogues of a protein can act in the signalling network.
Since then I have been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Cambridge University, where my main focus was how can we use networks to predict mechanisms of action of compound combinations. I used various chemical informatics techniques besides network biology such as chemical fingerprints, machine learning and gene expression-based toxicity prediction.
Currently, I am working at the Earlham Institute and Quadram Institut in Norwich researching inflammatory bowel disease and using network biology to decipher the pathogenesis of complex disorders.
I have recently moved to Imperial College, London to go through the therapeutic celling in IBD using systems biology.
Todd J Vision
I am Associate Professor of Biology, and Adjunct Professor of Information and Library Science, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Much of my work has been on evolutionary genetics in plants, including ancient genome duplications, phylogenetic analysis of gene family diversification, and structural genomic variation in natural populations. I also have interests in computational biology, particularly the applications of ontologies for reasoning over large scale about phenotypic diversity data, and have been engaged in a number of projects to study and improve the infrastructure for scholarly communication, particularly open research data.
Fiore Capozzi
Fiore Capozzi is a researcher in Botany at the Department of Biology at Univeristy of Naples Federico II. His research interests concern: i) studies of plants as biomonitor of air quality; ii) studies on phytoremediation and on the effects of pollutants on plant organisms; iii) studies on factors affecting the growth of plants in Space environment.
Andrew L Eamens
Dr Andrew Eamens joined the School of Health at the University of the Sunshine Coast as a Lecturer in Biomedical Science in 2022. Prior to joining the University of the Sunshine Coast, Andrew held teaching or research positions at the University of Queensland, University of Newcastle, University of Sydney, University of York, and CSIRO Agriculture and Food.
Judith Yanowitz
Dr. Yanowitz received her B.S. in biology with a minor in literature from MIT in 1991, worked for two years in Titia de Lange’s laboratory at Rockefeller University studying telomere biology. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University where she worked on Drosophila melanogaster sex determination and dosage compensation in Paul Schedl’s lab. In 1999, she joined Andy Fire’s lab at the Carnegie Institution where she identified genes requiring for mesodermal tissue patterning in the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. Dr. Yanowitz started her own lab at Carnegie Institution in 2004 to study the effect of chromatin on meiotic crossover formation. She joined MWRI and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in November 2009 and is now a full Professor.
Giorgio Vallortigara
Giorgio Vallortigara is Professor of Neuroscience at the Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento, Italy, and he has been an Adjunct Professor at the School of Biological, Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at the University of New England, Australia for several years.
He is the author of over 400 scientific papers (with more than 30,000 citations overall; h-index: 76 Scopus; 96 Google Scholar), most in the area of animal cognition and comparative neuroscience. He discovered the first evidence of functional brain asymmetry in the so-called “lower” vertebrate species (fish, amphibians); he also worked on comparative cognition, in particular on visual perception of biological motion, and spatial and number cognition.
He served in the editorial boards of several cognitive science and neuroscience journals, he was co-editor of the journal “Laterality: Asymmetries of Brain, Body and Cognition” and has been the recipient of several awards.
His major research interest is the study of cognition in a comparative and evolutionary perspective, with particular reference to the mechanisms underlying the use of geometry in spatial navigation and the origins of number and object cognition in the animal brain. He also studied extensively the evolution of the asymmetry of the brain.
Burcu Bakir-Gungor
Burcu Bakir-Gungor received her B.Sc. degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University; her M.Sc. degree in Bioinformatics from Georgia Institute of Technology; and her PhD degree from Georgia Institute of Technology/Sabanci University. She worked at the Bioinformatics Research Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, from 2007-2009. From 2009 to 2011, she worked at the Department of Computer Engineering, Bahcesehir University. Then, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Genetics and Bioinformatics, at the same university. From 2012 to 2013, she was part of the Advanced Genomics and Bioinformatics Research Center, UEKAE, BILGEM, TUBITAK. Now, she works as an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering at Abdullah Gul University. In 2022, she received a prestigious award called the L‘ORÉAL – UNESCO National Fellowship for Women in Science Programme. She is the recipient of ‘‘Best Paper’’ awards at the UBMK 2020 and 4th EvoBIO Conferences. She acted as a member of the bioinformatics advisory board of the Turkish Genome Project. She is an editorial board member of PeerJ journal; the reviewer of several prestigious international journals including Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Journal of Computational Biology; and she is the Technical Program Committee member of UBMK and HIBIT conferences. Her research interests include bioinformatics, computational genomics, metagenomics, multi-omics, network and pathway-oriented analyses, next-generation sequencing data analysis; and applications of machine learning, data mining and pattern recognition in bioinformatics.
Gerrit T.S. Beemster
Professor of Biology at the University of Antwerp. Member of the Flemish Science Foundation review board. Editor of the journals Journal of Plant Research, Frontiers in Plant Science and PLOS ONE