About the Board of Editors
Senior Editors
ILEANA CRISTEA, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Dr. Cristea performed her graduate research at the Michael Barber Center for Mass Spectrometry, University of Manchester, UK, under the supervision of Simon Gaskell, and at the Toxicology Research & Development Department at GlaxoSmithKline, UK. She pursued her postdoctoral work in the mass spectrometry laboratory of Brian Chait at The Rockefeller University. The research of her group is at the interface between proteomics and virology. Her goal is to build an understanding of viral infection from a proteomics perspective. Broad questions that her lab is addressing are: How do viruses effectively modulate cellular pathways? How do hosts respond to viral infection? Can proteomics identify key host proteins to harness for therapeutic development? To accomplish these goals, her laboratory utilizes a multidisciplinary approach that integrates proteomics techniques with genomics, microscopy, bioinformatics, and virology. These approaches have allowed her group to bridge developments in mass spectrometry to critical findings in biology, identifying mechanisms used by viruses to manipulate their hosts, as well as defenses hosts deploy to protect themselves from viral attack. More
PIETER DORRESTEIN, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Departments of Pharmacology, Chemistry, and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. He also heads the Dorrestein laboratory, which aims to develop new mass spectrometry approaches to detect and characterize therapeutic leads as well as their biosynthesis. The research in his lab falls into four areas. (1) The functional characterization of novel posttranslational modifications involved in the biosynthesis of therapeutics or therapeutic targets. (2) Development of new methods to characterize metabolic exchange factors from microbial systems involved in cell-to-cell communication. All cells communicate with other cells. Currently, there are no tools to systematically study the molecular output of a small population of cells. His lab is developing mass spectrometry-based approaches to study the universal phenomenon of cell-to-cell communication to discover new biological modulators. (3) Therapeutic target identification, including off-targets. Target identification is very important to the therapeutic discovery pipeline. This is done in collaboration with other scientists at UCSD, UCSC, SALK, SIO, and elsewhere. (4) Monitoring the global response of therapeutics by monitoring the signaling proteome. While a therapeutic may have one or a few targets, the entire proteome of a cell or tissue will be affected. The phosphoproteome provides insight into the effect therapeutics have on cells or tissues and is monitored upon therapeutic stimulation, providing insights into key regulatory pathways. Dr. Dorrestein received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. More
JONATHAN EISEN, Ph.D., is a Professor at the University of California, Davis, with appointments in the School of Medicine and the College of Biological Sciences. His research focuses on communities of microbes and how they provide new functions - to each other or to a host. His study systems have included boiling acid pools, surface ocean waters, agents of many diseases, and the microbial ecosystems in and on plants and animals. He is also coordinating the largest microbial sequencing project to date - a Genomic Encyclopedia - being done at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, where he holds an Adjunct Appointment. His overarching goal in his research is to create a "Field Guide to the Microbes." Prior to UC Davis, he was on the faculty of The Institute for Genomic Research and held an Adjunct Appointment at the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Eisen is the Academic Editor in Chief of PLOS Biology. Dr. Eisen received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. More
JULIE HUBER, Ph.D., is a microbial oceanographer broadly interested in how basic Earth processes interact to create and maintain life in our ocean. Her research addresses some of the most central questions about the nature and extent of microbial life on Earth in one of its least explored corners, the subseafloor habitat beneath the ocean floor. A 2007 NASA Astrobiology Institute postdoctoral fellow, she has also received the L’Oréal USA for Women in Science fellowship. Beyond her duties as an Associate Scientist in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dr. Huber also serves as the Associate Director of the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, whose mission is to explore life beneath the seafloor and make transformative discoveries that advance science, benefit society, and inform and inspire the public. More
JANET JANSSON, Ph.D., is the Division Director of Biological Sciences at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). She obtained her Ph.D. in 1988 at Michigan State University and then established a successful research career in Sweden over the next 20 years. From 2000 to 2006, she was the Professor and Chair of Environmental Microbiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Vice Dean of the Natural Sciences Faculty, where she coordinated the Swedish strategic national center of excellence, the Uppsala Microbiomics Center. From 2007 to 2013, she was a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and from 2012 to 2014 an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley and the University of Copenhagen. She was recruited to PNNL in June 2014, and she currently also serves as the President of the International Society for Microbiology (ISME) and as a senior editor of the ISME Journal. Jansson has more than 30 years' experience in microbial ecology, with specific expertise in the use of molecular approaches (omics) to study complex microbial communities, such as those residing in soil, sediments, and the human gut. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, has more than 110 publications, and is the editor of two books on molecular microbial ecology and one textbook on soil microbiology. More
ROB KNIGHT, Ph.D., is a Professor at the University of California San Diego's Departments of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering. He completed a B.Sc. in Biochemistry in his native New Zealand at the University of Otago and then completed a Ph.D. on the origin and evolution of the genetic code with Laura Landweber in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He conducted postdoctoral research with Mike Yarus on RNA sequence space in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado and then was the first hire in the interdisciplinary BioFrontiers Institute (then CIMB) at the University of Colorado in 2004. Much of Dr. Knight's research focuses on the microbiome. He has participated in discoveries including linking gut microbes to obesity, diet, geography, age, and host behavior; the individualized nature of our microbes, which even link us to objects we touch; the role of pH rather than plant community or biome in structuring soil microbial communities globally; and the deep microbial "seed bank" that occurs in marine and perhaps other ecosystems. In 2009, he became an HHMI Early Career Scientist, and in 2012 he became an AAAS Fellow. More
KATHERINE POLLARD, Ph.D., is a Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. She is the founder and faculty supervisor of the Gladstone Bioinformatics Core and a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Institute for Human Genetics, and Institute for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her lab develops statistical and computational methods for the analysis of massive genomic data sets. Her current projects focus on two major areas of genome evolution: identifying the genetic basis for human-specific traits, such as our susceptibility to AIDS and atherosclerosis, and characterizing the human microbiome through metagenomic data. She was previously an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, Genome Center and Department of Statistics. She was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 1995 and the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2008. She is also a member of the California Academy of Sciences. Dr. Pollard earned her master's degree and Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed computationally intensive statistical methods for the analysis of microarray data with applications in cancer biology. She implemented these approaches in Bioconductor, an open source software program used with high-throughput genomic data. As a comparative genomics postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she participated in the Chimpanzee Genome Project and used this sequence to identify the fastest-evolving regions in the human genome, known as human accelerated regions. More
JEROEN RAES, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at KU Leuven. After his masters in Biochemistry and masters in Bioinformatics, Dr. Raes received his Ph.D. in bioinformatics and comparative genomics in the lab of Pierre Rouze and Yves Van de Peer from the University of Ghent. His focus was on the role of gene and genome duplication in evolution and the birth of novel gene functions. After an IWT postdoc with CropDesign on the identification of novel yield target genes, he moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, for a postdoc in the lab of Peer Bork on computational analysis of environmental sequence data (metagenomics), where he was later promoted to scientist, focusing on the integration of heterogeneous environmental "omics" data. The Raes lab combines large-scale, next-generation sequencing with novel computational approaches to investigate the functioning and variability of the healthy human microbiome at the systems level and to study its alteration in disease. More
PAMELA SILVER, Ph.D., is currently Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. She is also a core member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. with Bill Wickner at UCLA, where she elucidated mechanisms around membrane protein assembly in bacteria. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Mark Ptashne’s lab at Harvard University, she combined molecular and cell biology in yeast to understand movement of proteins from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. She has made significant contributions to cell, systems, and synthetic biology. Dr. Silver has led several major research efforts around bacterial engineering, for example, for ARPA-E. Her group focuses on designing biological systems for both health and sustainability. Recent innovations include bacteria that can sense and respond to their environment and the Bionic Leaf. More
NICOLE WEBSTER, Ph.D., is a Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics, University of Queensland. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2001 and subsequently undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Canterbury/Gateway Antarctica, where she investigated the utility of microbial symbionts as biomarkers for environmental stress in the Antarctic marine ecosystem and explored the role of microorganisms as inducers for settlement and metamorphosis of coral reef invertebrates. Dr. Webster currently leads a large research team that undertakes transdisciplinary research into how microorganisms contribute to reef ecosystem health. She uses experimental and field-based ecological research to explore multiple facets of coral reef microbiology and assess whether microorganisms contribute to transgenerational acclimatization of reef invertebrates under environmental change. In 2010, she was awarded the Australian Academy of Science Dorothy Hill medal for outstanding contributions to earth sciences. Dr. Webster currently serves as an ISME Board member and Director of the International Ambassador Program and is a member of the United Nations pool of experts for assessment of the state of the marine environment. More
JIAN XU, Ph.D., currently serves as Professor and Director of Single-Cell Center and Assistant Director General at Qingdao Institute of BioEnergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS-QIBEBT). He earned his B.S. in Biotechnology from Peking University in 1997, his M.S. in Computer Science, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Jeffrey Gordon's lab at Washington University in St. Louis in 2003. After serving as Research Instructor at Genome Institute of Washington University, he joined CAS-QIBEBT in 2008 and founded Single-Cell Center, CAS-QIBEBT. The Center has been developing single-cell analysis technologies and instruments (ramanome/meta-ramanome, Raman-activated cell sorting, and Raman-guided single-cell sequencing), as well as microalgal genome engineering tools. With these innovations, Dr. Xu and his colleagues are designing key ecological processes such as human-microbe symbiosis and microalgal CO2 fixation across the biological hierarchy of single cell, population, and consortium. His contribution was recognized by a number of career awards from NSFC, MOST, and CAS, such as the National Distinguished Young Scholars Award (2014) and the National Young Scientist Award for Science and Technology (2016). He has mentored nearly 20 doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars and was recognized for excellence in mentorship via the 2013 CAS 100 Best Doctoral Thesis Mentor Award and the 2014 UCAS-BHPB Mentorship Award. More