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.
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.
Antonina Dos Santos
Dr. Antonina dos Santos is a research scientist at the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA) and leads the Plankton and crustacean Lab. Antonina has been studying taxonomy and ecology of crustacean larvae in Portugal seas.
Much of Antonina research has been the study of unexplored phase of living resources, focusing her studies on larval dispersal and recruitment to the origin population. Besides working on the dispersal and recruitment of crustacean larvae she has also done some work on the taxonomy of the adult phase of caridean shrimps (Decapoda). In 2016 she created the GelAvista citizen science project to monitor the stranding's of jellyfish in Portuguese coasts. Antonina research topics is to investigate how environmental conditions influence ecological patterns and processes, such as abundance and productivity, distribution, and size structure of plankton species. She has been involved in many scientific multidisciplinary projects subject to competitive tendering national and European, and she has been chief scientist on more than 15 multidisciplinary oceanographic surveys off the Portuguese coast. Since 2014 she is the Portuguese member of ICES Science Committee. Antonina has previously worked as Director of the Department of Sea and Marine Resources at IPMA.
Tanvir Shahzad
Dr. Tanvir Shahzad is an Associate Professor at the Government College University, Faisalabad. He is an environmental scientist with a PhD in Agronomy, Ecology, Biogeochemistry from AgroParisTech.
Dr. Shahzad's research focuses on the intersections of soil biology, soil ecology, and use and assessment of nanomaterials for the benefit and sustainability of soils, more specifically, he is currently working on making Pakistan's soils sustainable.
Emanuela Felley-Bosco
Graduated in toxicology at the University of Lausanne, then trained at the Occupational Health Science Institute and at the Swiss Experimental Cancer Institute, and at the National Cancer Institute, USA. Main interest is cancer-related inflammation with special focus on mesothelioma. Principal investigator of translational research projects for the treatment of patients with mesothelioma, and non-clinical studies, which aim at a better understanding of the biology of mesothelioma development.
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
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.
Luciano Fadiga
M.D., Ph.D. He has a deep knowledge of and experience in electrophysiology in monkeys (single neurons recordings) and humans (transcranial magnetic stimulation, study of spinal excitability and brain imaging). His current research include the study of the relationships between action and language and the realization of brain-computer interfaces specifically designed for human use.
Timothy D Read
My research centers on genomics of infectious diseases, focusing on bacterial pathogens such as Chlamydia trachomatis, Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus anthracis. I use comparative approaches to understand evolution of traits such as virulence and antibiotic resistance phenotypes and develop countermeasures and diagnostics. I am becoming increasingly interested in investigating interactions of pathogens with the other microbiota within and outside the host. As a microbial geneticist by training I have a long-standing fascination with the movement of genes between bacteria by lateral gene transfer.