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.
Nick Fogt
Dr. Nick Fogt is a professor at the Ohio State University College of Optometry in the USA. His work is primarily in eye movements, head and eye coordination, and sports vision. He teaches courses in eye movements, retinal disease, and systemic disease.
Mario Negrello
Mario Negrello obtained a mechanical engineering degree in Brazil (1997), and later after a period in the industry (VW 1999-2004) including RD and Prototypes, obtained his Masters degree (2006) and PhD (summa cum laude) in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück in Germany in 2009. At that time, in the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin (Germany) for Intelligent Dynamics and Autonomous Systems, he researched artificial evolution of neural network controllers for autonomous robots (2007/08). This work was awarded a scholarship by the International Society of Neural Networks (INNS) to sponsor an eight-month period (2008/09) as a visiting researcher at the Computational Synthesis Lab at the Aerospace Engineering department of the Cornell University in USA (with Hod Lipson). In his first post doctoral period he acted a group leader at the Computational Neuroscience laboratory at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (with Erik De Schutter). He now heads a neuroscience lab that combines empirical research and computational methods (with Chris De Zeeuw). He has published in the fields of Machine Learning and Cognitive Robotics, Artificial Life, Evolutionary Robotics, Neuroethology and Neuroscience, as well as a monograph published by Springer US in the Series Cognitive and Neural systems entitled Invariants of Behavior (2012).
Brittany N Lasseigne
Brittany N. Lasseigne, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology at The University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. She trained in Biotechnology, Science, and Engineering at Mississippi State University (B.S.) and the University of Alabama in Huntsville (Ph.D.) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics and genomics at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
Her lab develops and applies genomic- and data-driven strategies (including single-cell and long-read sequencing) to discover biological signatures that might be used to improve patient care and provide insight into the cellular and molecular processes contributing to disease, especially for diseases impacting the brain and/or kidney. Their recent work includes prioritizing drug repurposing candidates for cancers and polycystic kidney disease, evaluating preclinical models and cross-species transcriptomic signatures to improve disease modeling, and applying single-cell and long-read technologies to neurological disease tissues to understand the role that context plays in disease etiology, progression, and treatment.
The Lasseigne Lab is currently focused on integrating genomics data, functional annotations, and patient information with machine learning and regulatory network approaches across diseases that impact the brain or kidney to discover novel mechanisms in disease etiology and progression, identify genome-driven therapeutic targets and opportunities for drug repositioning and repurposing, determine clinically-relevant biomarkers, and understand how cellular context contributes to these diseases. Collectively, these distinct projects all apply genetics and genomics to human diseases and build tools to accelerate future research. Their lab also develops data science software and analytical pipelines that are open-source, well-documented, and hosted by third-party code distributors, critical for facilitating reproducibility and enabling the research community to use the methods they develop.
Roger N Jones
Roger Jones is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Victoria Institute for Strategic Economic Studies (VISES) at Victoria University, Melbourne. He leads a small team who work on climate-related risk, ecological and institutional economics and research into practice. The group applies a transdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing risk that bridges science, economics and policy. Roger previously worked for Australia’s CSIRO for 13 years, developing methods for climate risk assessment. Qualified in earth science, he has worked on urban ecology, been a museum curator and technical essayist, public radio host and researcher working on past, present and future climates and their impacts. He was Coordinating Lead Author on the chapter Foundations of Decision Making in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group II Fifth Assessment Report. He was also Coordinating Lead Author on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and a lead author on the Third Assessment Report.
Shao-Chen Sun
Professor of Reproductive Biology at Nanjing Agricultural University. Focused on molecular mechanisms of mammalian oocyte maturation and reprodutive toxiology.
Carlos A Santamaria
Santamaria’s primary research interests are on cryptic biodiversity and phylogeography of coastal invertebrates, particularly those from highly biodiverse and geologically active regions such as Hawai’i, southern Africa, Pacific Islands, the Greater Caribbean Region, the Mediterranean and the Baja Peninsula of Mexico.
As a Hispanic, he is aware of the difficulties that under-represented students face in higher education and when pursuing careers in the biological sciences. Thus, he is dedicated to increasing their participation in the sciences. He has mentored undergraduates who self-identify as members of underrepresented groups in his research activities. He also participates in community outreach events as well as professional development programs geared towards developing a better understanding of the needs of a multi-cultural student body and to improve the participation of under-represented groups in the sciences.
G. Christopher Cutler
Professor and Associate Dean Research, Dalhousie University
Interests in Agricultural Entomology and Ecotoxicology
Sankar Subramanian
Senior Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Moreton Bay, Brisbane, Australia; USC Senior Research Fellow; Smithsonian Fellow; Adjunct Research Fellow (Griffith University)
Dr Sankar Subramanian is a Senior Lecturer in Genetics. Sankar joined USC as a Senior Research Fellow in March 2017. Prior to this he worked at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University. His research primarily centers around the question of, how does genetic drift influence mutations. Sankar worked on a number of research projects to investigate the interaction between drift and mutations, which include the evolution of codon usage bias in animal genomes, temporal patterns of deleterious mutations in humans and penguins, difference in the allele frequencies of polymorphisms in global human populations. Sankar has developed methods to identify and quantify deleterious mutations in human populations. Dr Subramanian is also interested in estimating rates of mutations and divergence times between species and populations. His research also focuses on studying ancient genomes to understand the past demographic history of vertebrates including ancient penguins, tuatara (a New Zealand reptile), moa (an extinct bird) and ancient humans. Furthermore, he is investigating the population history, mutational load and admixture patterns of modern and ancient Aboriginal Australians. At USC, he has started working on the conservation genomics of Australian Dingoes.
Xiaolei Huang
Professor of Entomology at the State Key Laboratory of Ecological Pest Control for Fujian and Taiwan Crops, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. Main research interests of Xiaolei Huang's lab include insect diversity, systematics, biogeography, behavior, species interactions. His lab focuses on different taxonomic groups (e.g. insect-symbiont, insect-plant, insect-insect) to understand ecology and evolution of the diversity of species interactions. He also works actively on some general issues including data sharing and open science in ecology and evolution, and trends of biological taxonomy. During the recent years, the lab has been establishing specimen collection and DNA barcode library of subtropical aphids and scale insects in China, as well as research platform for studying species interactions and insect ecology and evolution across different disciplines from field ecology to genomics.
Maria del Carmen Portillo
MC Portillo holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Seville (2007). She has held postdoctoral stays at IRNAS-CSIC (2007-2009, Seville), Boulder University (2009-2011, Colorado) and Abengoa Research (2012-2014, Seville). She currently conducts her research at the Rovira i Virgili University (2014-present, Tarragona). Her research line is the study of microbial diversity in wine-related environments applying molecular techniques and in particular, mass sequencing techniques.
Goo Jun
I am currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. I work on statistical genetics, computational biology, bioinformatics, and sequence data analysis. With backgrounds in machine learning and data mining, my research is focused on development of computational and statistical methods for analysis of massive data to understand genetics and biology of complex traits. I have been working on the analysis of large-scale next-generation sequencing data, for which I developed statistical models and software pipelines for detecting sample contamination, variant discovery, machine-learning based variant filtering, and genotyping of structural variations. I also work on genetics of diabetes, obesity, and related traits and study of metabolomic and microbiome compositions related to genetics of common and complex traits.
Gerhard Andersson
Professor of Clinical Psychology at Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. Also researcher at Karolinska Institute, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Stockholm, Sweden. Clinical psychologist at the ENT department, Linköping University Hospital. Linköping Sweden. President, European Society for Research on Internet Interventions; Past president and co-founder, International Society for Research on Internet Interventions.