Hilary G Morrison

Summary

Dr. Hilary Morrison is a molecular biologist with graduate and postgraduate training in virology and infectious disease epidemiology. She is a senior research scientist at the MBL with research interests in parasite genomics, microbial ecology, and sequencing technology. She led the project to sequence, assemble, and annotate the Giardia lamblia genome, published in Science in 2007. Giardia, as well as being a medically important human parasite, is an enigmatic microbe that exhibits an early divergence in the eukaryotic domain of life. Morrison was part of an MBL team that developed pyrotag sequencing, a method for defining microbial population structures using high-throughput next generation instruments to sequence short regions of the ribosomal RNA gene. She has been instrumental in obtaining and developing protocols for new sequencing technologies and developing new software tools and pipelines. She was part of a multi-institutional team that developed a transposon-based next-generation library construction technique. Morrison collaborates on diverse microbiome projects including the gut and lung microbiomes of cystic fibrosis patients and the macroalgal microbiome across time and space.

Bioinformatics Biotechnology Genomics Microbiology Molecular Biology