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.
Faheem Ahmad
Dr. Faheem Ahmad is Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology and Nematology in the Department of Botany at Aligarh Muslim University, India. Author of over 40 peer-reviewed publications, his research interests include plant-nematode interaction, mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, nematode management and nematicidal bioagents.
Diego F Gomez-Casati
Dr. Gomez-Casati received his Bs in Biochemistry from the National University of Rosario, Argentine, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires. He carried out postdoctoral research at the Chascomus Institute of Technology, Argentine, and Bordeaux 2 University, France. He was a visiting Scientist at California State University, Fullerton, USA, Laboratoire Microbiologie Cellulaire et Moleculaire et Pathogenicite, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université Bordeaux-2, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile and Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de Plantas (Univ. Politecnica de Madrid), Spain. He was Professor of Plant Biotechnology at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM, 2000-2019). At the present, he is a researcher from the National Research Council, Argentine (CONICET), Director of the Plant & Algae Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Laboratory at the Institute for Photosynthetic and Biochemical Studies (CEFOBI-CONICET), Professor & Chair of the Biological Chemistry Department at the National University of Rosario and Vicedirector of CEFOBI.
Simon F Shamoun
Experienced Research Scientist with a demonstrated history of working with the Canadian Forest Service. Skilled in Forest Pathology, Forest Indigenous & Invasive Alien Pathogens, Sequence Analysis, Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR), Epidemiology, and Molecular Ecology. Strong research professional with a M.Sc. & Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees focused in Forest Pathology, Biotechnology & Forest Pest Management from N.C. State University & University of Arkansas, USA, respectively.
Sreeprasad T Sreenivasan
Sreeprasad Sreenivasan is an Asst. Professor in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Texas at El Paso. After completing his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Kansas State University and Rice University. Before joining UTEP, Dr. Sreenivasan was a faculty member at Clemson University (Research Scientist) and University of Toledo (Research Asst. Professor). His research interest is in two-dimensional quantum materials. In addition to probing the fundamental properties, his lab also applies quantum structures with engineered properties for electronics, energy, sensing, and biomedical applications.
Motoki Takaku
Assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Ph.D., Biochemistry, Waseda University (Dr. Kurumizaka Hitoshi). Postdoc training, NIEHS (Dr. Paul A. Wade)
Research interests include: Epigenetics, chromatin, gene regulation in cancer
Xiaomin Li
Professor of Environmental Science at SCNU Environmental Research Institute (SERI) in South China Normal University (SCNU).
She was the awardee of Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, 2015) from Australian Research Council, Guangdong Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars (2017), and Guangdong Special Support Plan for High-Level Young Talents of Science and Technology Innovation (2017).
Her research areas include biogeochemistry, environmental microbiology, and soil pollution control. She has been committed to the transformation mechanisms of organochlorines and arsenic in soils driven by microorganisms, and their coupling processes with transformation of carbon, iron, and nitrogen.
Rui Feng
I have been developing and applying statistical models and algorithms in genetics and genomics for more than 10 years. I have contributed both methodological and applied work in family-base studies, copy number variation analysis, genome-wide association studies, and next generation sequence data analysis.
I joined Penn’s biostatistics in August 2009 after receiving my PhD in biostatistics from Yale University and working as a faculty in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. My research interests focus on methodologies and applications in clinical and genetic studies.
Claudia Pogoreutz
My work broadly focuses on marine host-microbe systems, or ‘holobionts’, and the metabolic interactions that arise from and drive these complex symbiotic associations. I have always been interested in the microbial functions underlying holobiont health, resilience, and ecological adaptation, and how they shape holobiont stress responses. For this, I mainly use the cnidarian-algae symbiosis and associated bacteria as model systems, but have recently also started exploring the community structure, dynamics, and metabolic properties of fish skin microbiomes. My past and current research includes work on the contribution of nitrogen cycling pathways in cnidarian holobiont functioning and symbiotic breakdown, e.g., coral ‘bleaching’, as well as the elucidation of unknown functions of coral bacterial symbionts. For this, my approach has been to combine traditional physiological and culture-dependent techniques with high throughput-, next generation -omics applications, including whole genome and gene amplicon sequencing, transcriptomics, and proteomics. Currently, I am expanding my scope to targeted investigations of symbiotic metabolic interactions as a driver of osmoregulation in cnidarian holobionts employing nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS) along with isotopic profiling metabolomics.
Myrka Zago
Myrka Zago (PhD) is Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She is Director of the Center of Space BioMedicine of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She is Research Director of the Laboratory of Visuomotor Control and Gravitational Physiology at Fondazione Santa Lucia. She is an expert in visuomotor control, gravitational physiology and physiology of locomotion.
Katrine L Whiteson
Katrine Whiteson uses metagenomics, metabolomics, microbiology and ecological statistics to answer questions about how microbes and viruses affect human health. She studied Biochemistry at UC Berkeley (BA, 2000) and University of Chicago (PhD, 2007). During her PhD, Dr. Whiteson focused on the active site chemistry and DNA binding specificity of a site-specific recombinase from the class of proteins that enable the spread of antibiotic resistance genes. In 2008, she began a new job at the University of Geneva Hospitals with Dr. Jacques Schrenzel and Dr. Patrice Francois. This was an exciting era, just at the start of the Human Microbiome Project, for asking basic unanswered questions about the microbes and viruses inhabiting various niches of the human body. Dr. Whiteson focused on the oral microbial communities of healthy Europeans, and malnourished kids in Niger who develop a devastating facial gangrene known as noma. In 2011 she moved to Forest Rohwer’s lab at San Diego State, where she undertook breath and sputum metabolite analysis to better understand the activity of CF patient microbial communities from Dr. Doug Conrad’s Adult CF clinic at UCSD. Combining information about the genetic potential of a microbial community through DNA sequencing with the activity of the community by metabolite profiling is a powerful approach that Dr. Whiteson hopes to employ in future projects as she begins her own lab at University of California Irvine in Fall 2014.
Corey Nislow
Corey Nislow's laboratory develops and uses cutting edge tools to address this central question: how can we understand the biological commonalities in all of the life sciences; from embryonic development, to the spread of infectious diseases to better ways to treat cancer. Each of these disciplines can be explained in the context of competition, interaction and evolution. His lab studies the interface between genes and the environment using parallel genome-wide screens, high throughput cell-based assays and next generation sequencing. Most recently, he and his scientific partner, Dr. Guri Giaever, are exploring how laboratory experiments can co-opt evolutionary processes to understand drug action. He enjoys teaching all aspects of biotechnology, genomics and drug discovery. He got his PhD from the University of Colorado, worked at several Biotechnology companies and was at Stanford and University of Toronto before joining UBC in 2013. He has published 161 papers and run 19 marathons.
Olja Vidjak
Dr. Olja Vidjak's educational background includes an MSc in Oceanology (1998) and a PhD in Biology (2004) from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is a researcher at the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries (Croatia), with primary specialization in the ecology and taxonomy of marine zooplankton. Her research interests include the spread and management of aquatic non-native species and marine biodiversity conservation.