Andrew Kern
Senior Editor

Andrew Kern is an Evergreen Professor in the Department of Biology and the Institute for Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. His research combines modern machine learning methods with classical probabilistic approaches and large-scale simulation to gain insight into population genetic and evolutionary biological questions. His lab focuses on methods development, creating new tools that empower the field to gain insights that weren’t attainable previously. One fundamental thread that has run through his entire research career is understanding the impact of natural selection on genetic variation in natural populations including models such as humans, mosquitoes, and fruit flies as well as non-model systems such as barnacles and octopuses.  He completed his ScB in Biology at Brown University and his PhD in Population Genetics at the University of California, Davis. Kern was an NIH Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he studied Computational Biology under the mentorship of David Haussler. Before arriving at the University of Oregon, Kern served as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Dartmouth College, and both an Assistant and Associate Professor of Genetics at Rutgers University.

Thomas Hurd
Associate Editor, Molecular Genetics of Development

Thomas Hurd is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. He earned his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Toronto and his PhD in mitochondrial biology at Cambridge University, where he studied under Michael Murphy. During his postdoctoral fellowship with Ruth Lehmann at NYU, he used Drosophila to uncover mechanisms of mitochondrial inheritance through the female germline. His current research continues to investigate this topic through genetic, molecular, and cytological approaches.

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Alexander Edward Lipka
Senior Editor

Alexander Edward Lipka leads a research team at the University of Illinois that applies cutting-edge statistical approaches to quantitative genetics analyses, resulting in more accurate quantification of genomic signals underlying phenotypic variation and prediction of breeding values of agronomically important traits. His lab also develops freely available software that enables the broader research community to apply these approaches to their own work. Here are some examples of publications from his lab:

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Antonis Rokas
Senior Editor

Antonis Rokas holds the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in Biological Sciences and is a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. He also serves as the Founding Director of the Vanderbilt Evolutionary Studies Initiative, an interdisciplinary center that unites scholars from diverse disciplines with broad interests and expertise in evolution-related fields. Research in the Rokas lab focuses on the study of the DNA record to gain insight into the patterns and processes of evolution. Using computational and experimental approaches, their current studies aim to understand the molecular foundations of the fungal lifestyle, the reconstruction of the tree of life, and the evolution of human pregnancy. Rokas is a Guggenheim Fellow (2018), a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2019), and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (2020).

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Justin Borevitz
Associate Editor

Justin Borevitz is a researcher and professor at The Australian National University. The Borevitz lab works on evolutionary plant genomics, moving from model organisms to foundation species of agriculture and ecosystems. They are interested in the identification and prediction of climate adaptation alleles, the traits they control, and the environments they are filtered in. Borevitz’s lab takes a landscape genomic approach, using long read sequencing, assembly and (structural) variant calling of individuals across large, diverse populations. They also take a phenomic approach to dissect adaptive traits among offspring in selected families, grown across common gardens (seedlings to saplings to satellite).

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Amy MacQueen
Senior Editor, Genome Integrity and Transmission

Amy MacQueen has a long-standing interest in the molecular mechanisms that facilitate the unique chromosome dynamics of meiosis. After substantial training in classical genetic and cytological approaches in Drosophila as an undergraduate in Dr. Tulle Hazelrigg’s lab at Columbia University, she turned to C. elegans for her PhD research. Working in Dr. Anne Villeneuve’s lab at Stanford University, Amy credits an elegant forward genetics screen developed by Anne, tremendous cytology offered by the worm germline, and brilliant colleagues in the Villeneuve lab with helping her identify several key trans-acting factors required for homologous chromosome pairing in C. elegans meiocytes. Her thesis research also identified a critical role for cis-acting chromosome domains in coordinating a mechanism of pairing establishment with one that fortifies and maintains homolog alignment—the latter involving assembly of an elaborate, meiosis-specific chromosome structure called the synaptonemal complex (SC). As a Helen Hay Whitney post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Shirleen Roeder’s lab at Yale University, MacQueen discovered cellular pathways in S. cerevisiae meiotic cells that ensure SC assembly is prevented until earlier chromosome pairing events have successfully occurred. MacQueen joined Wesleyan University’s Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Department in 2009, initially funded by an NIH Pathway to Independence Award. Her lab uses powerful molecular genetic, biochemical, and cytological approaches in conjunction with high- and super-resolution microscopy to study the molecular architecture and dynamic properties of budding yeast SC, as well as the functional and spatial relationship(s) between SC structure and meiotic recombination machinery.

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Erica Larschan
Associate Editor, Experimental Technologies and Resources

In Larschan’s lab, they are deciphering mechanisms of coordinate gene regulation which is a fundamental process essential to all cells from the germ line to the immune system to neurons. Their long-term goal is to define how genes are identified for coordinate regulation, the key initial step in their regulation. Dosage compensation is one of the best model systems for studying this process because all of the genes on a single chromosome are specifically identified and co-regulated. Drosophila, like mammals, increase the transcript levels of a large number of diversely-regulated genes along the length of the single male X-chromosome precisely two-fold relative to each female X-chromosome. They are also very interested in how transcription is linked to splicing and how these processes are coordinated across developmental time.

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Carolyn Phillips
Associate Editor, Gene Expression

Carolyn Phillips is an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California studying RNA silencing and gene regulation in C. elegans. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, working on the mechanisms of meiotic pairing and synapsis with Abby Dernburg. During her postdoc with Gary Ruvkun at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, she discovered a compartmentalized hub for small RNA biogenesis in C. elegans germ cells. This work led to her overarching interest in understanding how RNA silencing pathways are spatially organized. She further seeks to discover factors that modulate RNA silencing and contribute to the specificity of pathway. The Phillips lab tackles these questions using a combination of cell biology, microscopy, molecular genetics and genomics. Carolyn has been a March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Scholar (2017-2019) and a Pew Scholar (2017-2020).

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Tina Mukherjee
Associate Editor

Tina Mukherjee is an Associate investigator at the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem), in Bangalore, India where she leads a laboratory as part of the Regulation of Cell Fate area. The interest of her laboratory lies in understanding the importance of metabolic activity in innate immune development and function. The lab uses Drosophila to explore the diverse impact of metabolism on innate immune development and function. While this defines Mukherjee’s core interest in metabolic regulation of hematopoiesis, she also employs the power of other model systems in uncovering the underlying animal physiology that regulates these developmental level immune-metabolic state transitions. This allows Mukherjee to integrate physiology with immune-development and constitutes her fundamental approach in identifying novel paradigms of myeloid development but also hematopoiesis in general.

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A new associate editor is joining GENETICS in statistical genetics and genomics. We’re excited to welcome Lei Sun to the editorial team.

Lei Sun
Associate Editor
Lei Sun is a Professor in Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of Toronto. She studied mathematics at Fudan University and obtained her PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago in 2001. Her research area is in statistical genetics and genomics, with a focus on robust association methods, multiple hypothesis testing, selective inference, and more recently methods for the X chromosome. In 2017, she received the prestigious Centre de recherches mathématiques-Statistical Society of Canada Prize in Statistics, and in 2020, she served as the President of the Biostatistics Section of the Statistical Society of Canada.