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.
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.
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.
Andrew Mitchell
Dr. Andrew Mitchell is a Senior Research Scientist at the Australian Museum Research Institute. His research interests include systematics of noctuid moths (Lepidoptera), molecular phylogenetics, insect diversity, species delimitation and diagnostics, and DNA barcoding.
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.
Nikolaos Gkantidis
Nikolaos Gkantidis has been a full-time Senior Staff Member at the Department of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, University of Bern, Switzerland, since 2016. He earned the Venia Docendi (Privatdozent) title from the same institution in 2018 and the Assoc. Prof. title in 2024. Prof. Gkantidis graduated from the Dental School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (2006). Subsequently, he pursued a post-graduate program in Orthodontics at the University of Athens, graduating with honours (2010), and run an orthodontic practice in Thessaloniki (2010-2016). Prof. Gkantidis completed his doctoral studies in Bern (2013) and also served as a part-time staff member of the Department (2012-2016). In 2022, he obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Prof. Gkantidis has published numerous original research papers and forged national and international collaborations in key research areas, which include the development and utilization of 3D imaging techniques in clinical research and practice, the study of facial attractiveness, and the investigation of craniofacial form. For his innovative work he has received various national and international grants and awards.
Marcus Fraga Vieira
Prof. Marcus Vieira is the Bioengineering and Biomechanics Laboratory head at Universidade Federal de Goiás. He received BS in Electrical Engineering and Physical Education from the Universidade Federal de Goiás, and MSc and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Universidade de São Paulo. He focuses his research in computational neuroscience and biomechanics, especially in motoneuron modeling, spinal CPG, nonlinear tools for movement variability analysis, including entropy, fractal dimension and recurrence analysis, coherence analysis in postural control, transitory tasks such as gait initiation, and gait dynamic stability.
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.