We are in the midst of a renaissance in the biological sciences, which is spurring the growth of brand new fields like functional and comparative genomics.
These new fields are revealing novel insights into evolutionary biology, medicine, developmental biology and many other areas, transforming the way scientists look at life.
Join the California Academy of Sciences to learn about genomics, hear about compelling current research, and explore the future of this rapidly advancing field.
Bio
Nadav Ahituv
Nadav Ahituv is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco.
He received his PhD in human genetics from Tel-Aviv University working on hereditary hearing loss. He then did his postdoc, specializing in human genomics, in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the DOE Joint Genome Institute. His current work is focused on discovering gene regulatory elements in the human genome and linking mutations within them to human disease.
Jeffrey Boore
Dr. Jeffrey Boore is Chief Executive Officer of Genome Project Solutions, Inc. and Associate Adjunct Professor at University of California, Berkeley. Jeffrey Boore began his comparative genomics work over two decades ago by sequencing, interpreting, and comparing the mitochondrial genomes of many animal groups, and has continued by working on both plastid and whole nuclear genomes.
He has had academic appointments at the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley, was Head of Evolutionary Genomics at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, and is CEO of Genome Project Solutions, Inc. He has led several whole genome sequencing projects, including those of the crustacean Daphnia pulex, the moss Physcomitrella patens, and the oomycete agent of Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, Phytophthora sojae.
His contributions have included the use of gene rearrangements for uncovering ancient evolutionary relationships, the demonstration that the vertebrate genome arose by two rounds of whole genome duplication, and the creation of software for doing whole genome evolutionary analysis.
Jonathan Eisen
Jonathan Eisen is a Professor at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the evolution of new functions and the genomic diversity of microbes and microbial communities.
Eisen is also a vocal advocate for “open science”, the Academic Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Biology, an active and award-winning blogger (e.g., http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com), and a scientific prankster.
Previously he was on the faculty of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) where he helped pioneer the field of phylogenomics. He earned his Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University and his undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard College
Katherine Pollard
Katherine received her Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley Division of Biostatistics under the supervision of Mark van der Laan. Her research at Berkeley included developing computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of microarray data with applications in cancer biology.
After graduating, she did a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Sandrine Dudoit. She developed Bioconductor open source software packages for clustering and multiple hypothesis testing. In 2003, she began a comparative genomics NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the labs of David Haussler and Todd Lowe in the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
She was part of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium that published the sequence of the Chimp Genome, and she used this sequence to identify the fastest evolving regions in the human genome. In 2005, she joined the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics. She moved to UCSF in Fall 2008.