Advisory Board and Editors Evolutionary Studies
Charles Ofria
Professor of Computer Science at Michigan State University; Director of the Digital Evolution Laboratory and Deputy Director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action.
Charles Ofria director of the Digital Evolution Laboratory. He conducts research on evolution in artificial systems and applies the results to problems in computer science and evolutionary biology. He developed Avida, a software-based research platform consisting of populations of 'digital organisms used in biological research. His work has been published in Science and Nature and his research has received international media attention in forums such as Discover Magazine, National Geographic, CNN, the BBC, New Scientist, and the New York Times.
Ludovic Orlando
Ludovic Orlando is a former student from the Ecole Normale Superieure of Lyon (ENS, 1996-2000), one of the top-5 French universities. First trained as a molecular biologist, he got more recently interested in computational biology and programming.
He received his PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Lyon, France in 2003, almost twenty years after the first ancient DNA molecule was ever sequenced. Trained in phylogenomics as a postdoc (CNRS EA 3781), he was rapidly appointed as a permanent Associate Professor at the prestigious ENS Lyon, where he taught and performed research between 2005 and 2010. He moved to the Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, in April 2010 to start his own research group. He was appointed as a full Professor in Molecular Archaeology in March 2016 and started in December 2016 a five year, ERC-funded project on horse evolution.
His group develops integrative approaches in ancient DNA research, promoting the field of palaeomics by the merger of biochemistry, molecular biology, genomics and computational biology.
Karen Osborn
Midwater biologist by way of Western Washington University, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), University of California Berkeley, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Thiago Parente
Scientist in Public Health at the Laboratory of Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (IOC, Fiocruz), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Scientific coordinator of the Institutional Bioinformatics Platform. CNPq Level 2 Research Productivity Scholar (Genetics). Permanent professor at the Graduate program on Systems and Computational Biology IOC, Fiocruz. Graduated in Biological Sciences - Genetics major - from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2006), with a Master's degree in Cell and Molecular Biology from the IOC (2008) and PhD in Biophysics from UFRJ (2012). Through high performance technologies for DNA sequencing and computational data analysis, I investigate the effects of pollution on fauna, using fish as model organisms, and their responses and genetic adaptations to pollutants, especially those involved in the xenobiotic biotransformation system.
Brett E Pickett
Dr. Brett Pickett is an Assistant Professor in the Microbiology and Molecular Biology Department at Brigham Young University. He completed his B.S degree in Microbiology from BYU in 2005, his Ph.D. training in Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his postdoctoral training in Pathology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He then obtained additional experience in industry, and at the J. Craig Venter Institute, where he led investigative studies in viral comparative genomics and the human transcriptional response during viral infection. His research develops data mining methods, applies machine learning techniques, and use advanced statistical workflows to better understand how human cells respond during infection.
Marcio R Pie
Associate Professor of Zoology, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil.
Graciela Piñeiro
Professor at Departamento de Evolución de Cuencas, Facultad de Ciencias, Montevideo, Uruguay. Investigator Level 1, Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación (ANII). Investigator Gº 4 of the Programa de Desarrollo de las Ciencias Básicas in Biological and in Geological Fields. Responsible for several research projects on Late Paleozoic communities, including comparative anatomy, systematics, paleobiology, taphonomy, biostratigraphy, paleobiogeography and paleoenvironments.
Xavier Pochon
Team Leader, Molecular Surveillance, Biosecurity Group, Cawthron Institute, New Zealand.
Associate Professor, Institute of Marine Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
My research at the Cawthron Institute is highly applied and consist of developing multi-trophic molecular tools for environmental monitoring of marine industries (e.g. aquaculture farms, marine biosecurity in ports and marinas, and deep-sea exploration).
At the University of Auckland, I combine 'real-world' and 'blue-sky' research applications, including; i) investigating functional underpinnings of Symbiodiniaceae in coral reef ecosystems, ii) characterizing microbiomes in aquaculture and natural settings, iii) measuring eDNA and eRNA decay rates in marine invertebrates and vertebrates, iv) studying preferential settlement of marine invasive species associated with marine plastic debris, and v) exploring the diversity and dynamics of open-ocean plankton communities in the Pacific and beyond.
Marylène Poirié
Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Genetics, Nice Sophia Antipolis University (France). Co-Head of the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute (INRA-CNRS-University of Nice Sophia Antipolis). Recipient of the Integrative Biology prize of the French Academy of Sciences (Balachovski prize). Member of the excutive committee of the Signalife Labex. Past member of the excutive committee of the European Doctoral School "Insect Science and Biotechnology".
Katherine S. Pollard
Associate Investigator at Gladstone Institutes and Associate Professor in the Institute for Human Genetics and the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco.
Mason Posner
Professor and former Chairperson of Biology and Toxicology at Ashland University in Ohio. My research focuses on the evolution, physiology and biochemistry of alpha crystallins, a group of small heat shock proteins that protect cells against stress and are implicated in numerous diseases such as lens cataracts, Parkinsons, Alzheimers and cancer. My undergraduate research students and I use the zebrafish and other fish species as models to investigate alpha crystallin function. Our work involves qPCR to measure gene expression, CRISPR gene editing, proteomics, transcriptomics, promoter analysis and histology.
My background is in marine biology, systematics, ecology, molecular biology, protein biochemistry and comparative visual physiology. I train undergraduate research assistants in my laboratory and prepare students for graduate and professional schools and work in industry.
Nikolay A Poyarkov
I am a herpetologist working on diverse aspects of taxonomy, phylogeny and biodiversity of Asian herpetofauna. I have graduated from the Department of Vertebrate Zoology of Lomonosov Moscow State University and finished my PhD on taxonomy and evolution of Asian salamanders (Hynobiidae) in 2010. Presently I am working in this department as an associate professor. My study is focused on a set of topics on evolutionary biology and taxonomy of Asian amphibians and reptiles, including molecular systematics, phylogeography, DNA-barcoding, distribution and taxonomy of certain groups of Asian herps.