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.
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.
Barry W Brook
Barry Brook, a conservation biologist and modeller, is an ARC Australian Laureate Professor and Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania. Leader of the Dynamics of Eco-evolutionary Patterns (DEEP) research group and the UTAS node of CABAH, Barry is a highly cited scientist, having published three books, over 350 refereed papers, and many popular articles. His awards include the 2006 Australian Academy of Science Fenner Medal, the 2010 Community Science Educator of the Year and 2013 Scopus Researcher of the Year. He focuses on global change biology, ecological dynamics, paleoenvironments, energy systems, and statistical-simulation models.
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.
Kevin Mueller
I'm an assistant professor at Cleveland State University. My primary area of research is the ecology and biogeochemistry of temperate forests and grasslands, with an emphasis on plant-environment interactions. For example, I've studied the impacts of climate change, land management, and diversity loss on ecosystem functions of North American grasslands. I frequently use measures of plant functional traits or stable isotope ratios to better understand a variety of ecological concepts and biogeochemical processes, including how plants respond to the environment and interact with cycles of water, nutrients, and carbon.
Francesco Nucera
Dr. Francesco Nucera is Research Fellow within the Pneumology Department of Biomedical, Dental and Morphological and Functional Imaging Sciences (BIOMORF) at the University of
Messina, Italy.
His primary area of expertise is in the specialization in Respiratory Diseases.
Dominic Thorrington
Dr. Dominic Thorrington is Scientific Project Manager at the French healthcare regulator, La Haute Autorité de Santé.
He is an experienced health economist, infectious disease epidemiologist and mathematician, specialising in the modelling of infectious disease outbreaks and evaluating the cost-effectiveness of vaccination strategies.
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.
Linda W Kelly
I received my doctorate in 2013 from the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Cell and Molecular Biology. I joined the Dept of Biology at San Diego State University as an Adjunct Research Professor in 2014. My research focuses on understanding changes in coastal marine microbial communities in response to environmental perturbations. Most of my research thus far has focused on coral associated microbes. Specifically, I use metagenomics to identify the taxonomic distribution and functional capacity of microbial communities in marine ecosystems that are subjected to varying nutrient availability, anthropogenic stressors, and comprising different benthic compositions.