ISEEM:Who We Are

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Principle Investigators

Jonathan Eisen is an evolutionary biologist and Professor at U. C. Davis with appointments in the Genome Center, the Section of Evolution and Ecology and the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology. He is interested in the genomic basis for the origin of novelty in microbes and in the effects of differences in evolvability between species. See his lab page for more information.

Jessica Green is an Assistant Professor at the Center of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Oregon and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Her lab applies theoretical, computational and empirical approaches to study biodiversity and biogeography across life's domains.

Katherine Pollard is Associate Investigator in the Gladstone Institutes and Associate Professor of Biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco. She is PI of a comparative genomics lab that develops statistical and computational methodology. Her research focuses on molecular evolution, in particular identification of genome sequences that differ significantly between or within species and their relationship to biomedical and ecological traits of interest.

Eisen Lab at UC Davis

Investigators

Morgan Langille is a postdoctoral researcher who joined the iSEEM project in May 2009 and is studying gene and organism novelty. He received his PhD from Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada, where he studied and developed methods for the identification of genomics islands.

Srijak Bhatnagar is a bioinformatics engineer at the UC Davis Genome Center. He provides the bioinformatics infrastructure support for the iSEEM project. He received his M.S in Bioinformatics from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was working with Dr. Joshua Weitz on clustering of metagenomics sequences.

Dongying Wu is a Staff Scientist.

Guillaume Jospin is a bioinformatics engineer at the UC Davis Genome Center. He reveived his M.S in Bioinformatics from the Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse III, France where he developed a storage and analysis platform for microarray data.

Collaborators

Jenna Morgan is a Graduate Student.

Amber Hartman is a Graduate Student.

Aaron Darling is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2006 he received a Ph.D. in Computational Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and spent two years of postdoctoral study on the beaches of Brisbane, Australia at the University of Queensland.

Green Lab at University of Oregon

Investigators

Steven Kembel is a postdoctoral researcher with a background in quantitative ecology and evolutionary biology. He is interested in understanding patterns of, and the processes responsible for, the structure and function of ecological communities.

James O'Dwyer is a postdoctoral research associate in theoretical ecology, with a background in mathematical physics. After completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge, James joined the Green lab in August 2007, and spends most of his time trying to solve analytical models of ecological communities. On the theoretical side he is interested in neutral theory, spatial models and traits, and on the empirical side in developing new tools to analyze microbial metagenomic data.

Collaborators

Elizabeth Perry is a PhD student co-advised by Brendan Bohannan. She has a B.A. and M.A. in biology from Wesleyan University where she worked with Fred Cohan studying species concepts and speciation in Bacillus subtilis. She is interested in the interplay between ecological and evolutionary dynamics in microbial communities.

Jessica A Bryant is a research assistant. She has a M.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Oregon where she worked with Jessica Green developing a phylogenetic beta-diversity metric and studying microbial diversity across an elevation gradient.

Pollard Lab at UCSF

Investigators

Joshua Ladau will begin work on the iSEEM project as a postdoctoral researcher with Katherine Pollard in mid-October, 2008. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2006, with a focus on ecology and statistics. His research centers on understanding the mechanisms structuring ecological communities through the development of optimal inferential methods.

Samantha Riesenfeld joined the iSEEM project in November 2008 as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Katherine Pollard at the Gladstone Institutes and UCSF. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley, where her research focused on graph algorithms and discrete optimization. Currently, she is interested in developing new algorithms for analyzing microbial metagenomic data.

Thomas Sharpton

Wu Lab at University of Virginia

Martin Wu is a Staff Scientist.

Alex Koeppel joined the iSEEM project in November 2009 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Martin Wu's lab at UVA. His Ph.D. in Biology is from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. His research interests include species concepts, and the use of bioinformatic tools to identify the fundamental units of diversity within microbial communities.