Editor-in-Chief
Steve is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford. He is also Tutorial Fellow in Biological Sciences at The Queen’s College (University of Oxford) and Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Plant Science Innovation. Steve began his research career as a molecular biologist and protein biochemist working on trypanosomes; after his PhD, his post-doc and early independent career were predominantly computational - studying the origin of life and developing novel computational tools for biological data analysis. Steve’s lab switched focus to working on plants in 2013 and now studies the biology of photosynthesis in plants, answering questions about how it evolved, how it works and how it is controlled. Steve’s group studies these questions with an overarching goal to help engineer the crop plants of the future, and enable sustainable food production to keep pace with global population increase.
Areas of expertise: Evolution, photosynthesis, bioinformatics, genomics, transcriptomics, gene expression regulation, computational biology, plant biology.
Deputy Editors
Cathy Jackson is currently a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) research director at the Institut Jacques Monod, Paris, France. She carried out doctoral studies in genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, with Leland H. Hartwell, and postdoctoral studies in the department of André Sentenac at the CEA, Saclay, France, in collaboration with the laboratory of Marc Chabre, IPMC, Nice, France.
Her laboratory is interested in the molecular mechanisms regulating vesicular and lipid trafficking in yeast and mammalian cells, a fundamental aspect of eukaryotic cellular organization.
Areas of expertise: Membrane dynamics, vesicular trafficking, lipid trafficking, lipid droplets, membrane contact sites.
Jin is a Distinguished Professor in the Division of Biological Sciences and School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, USA. She did her PhD with Kathryn Anderson at the University of California, Berkeley and was then a Jane Coffin Childs post-doctoral fellow with H. Robert Horvitz in the Department of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then moved back to California in 1996 to start up her own group at the UC Santa Cruz campus. She became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2001. Her lab moved to UC San Diego campus in 2007. She is interested in the development of the nervous system, particularly using C. elegans genetics to investigate how synapses are formed and function. Recently, she has ventured into the genetic basis of adult neuronal regenerative ability. She was a recipient of the Presidential Early-Career Award for Science and Engineering. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Areas of expertise: Genetics, neuronal development, synapses, axon regeneration, signal transduction, C. elegans.
Editors
Kendra J. Greenlee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Dakota State University. She earned her PhD in Biology at Arizona State University with Jon Harrison and completed postdoctoral training in Farrah Kheradmand’s lab in the section of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, where she was awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein fellowship. She started her research group at NDSU in 2007, with a focus on understanding how physiological systems change throughout juvenile and pupal development in insects, including the tracheal respiratory system, immunity, fat storage, and metabolism. She directs Pollination Nation, a REU program focused on training undergraduates to do research on insect biology.
Areas of expertise: Insects, physiology, development, metabolism, immunity, matrix metalloproteinases, respiration.
Lewis is a Professor of Environmental Physiology at the University of Roehampton in London, and he runs the Roehampton University Behavioural Ecology Lab (RUBEL). He undertook a PhD studying the behavioural-physiology of diving ducks, followed by a post-doc on the diving of king penguins, while based at the University of Birmingham in the UK. He then moved to his current institution, and broadened his research remit to the comparative study of animal behaviour, physiology and energetics, studying a diverse range of model species from lobsters to humans. Lewis has been central to the development of the ‘accelerometry technique’ for estimating energy expenditure of animals in the field.
Areas of expertise: Accelerometry, comparative physiology, diving, ecophysiology, energetics.
Sjannie is currently a researcher and group leader at the Section for Physiology and Cell Biology at the Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo (Norway). She did her PhD at the Zoophysiology Section at Department of Biosciences at Aarhus University (Denmark), supervised by Assoc. Prof. Mark Bayley and Prof. Tobias Wang. Her work focused on oxygen requirement of air-breathing fish, particularly in the Mekong Delta. In 2012, she moved to Oslo to continue as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Prof. Göran Nilsson, working on the molecular mechanisms of anoxia tolerance in the crucian carp, and subsequently obtaining independent funding for her work. In addition, she has maintained her interest in the physiology of air-breathing fish, and been actively involved in research and debates concerning the effect of climate change on the physiology of fish.
Areas of expertise: Comparative physiology, ecophysiology, oxygen transport, hypoxia, hypercapnia.
Chris Maher is an Associate Professor within the Department of Internal Medicine and an Assistant Director of the McDonnell Genome Institute at the Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM). He received his doctorate in Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook University under the guidance of Drs. Lincoln Stein and Doreen Ware at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He then joined Arul Chinnaiyan’s laboratory at the University of Michigan Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics (CCMB) and Michigan Center for Translational Pathology (MCTP). He started his own group in 2011 at WUSM, focusing on integrating genomics, bioinformatics and molecular biology approaches to characterize RNA species, elucidate their function and assess their clinical applicability across solid tumors. He is also interested in the development of open-source tools to discover novel recurrent RNA chimeras.
Areas of expertise: Cancer genomics, transcriptomics, bioinformatics, non-coding RNAs.
Jenny began her research career in early mammalian development with Richard Gardner at the University of Oxford. She then joined Austin Smith for a long and fruitful collaboration to develop strategies for efficient derivation of embryonic stem cells from murine embryos. She became a group leader at the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute in 2006. Her group is interested in early mammalian development, in particular, how lineage decisions are made and how the embryo accommodates fluctuations in environment, signals and cell number to produce a foetus. The establishment of a population of cells that must protect itself from inappropriate differentiation, whilst retaining the capacity to respond to instructive cues in a timely manner is the main focus. To this end, the group studies genes associated with early embryonic lethality, mainly using genetic deletion and expression analysis. The group is also interested in early primate development and pluripotent.
Areas of expertise: Early mammalian development, stem cell derivation, embryonic cell potency, pluripotency networks.
Dr. Peng is a professor in the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, China. Dr. Peng’s lab focuses on non-coding RNA (ncRNA) research in human diseases, and aims to elucidate molecular mechanism of ncRNAs and explore their diagnostic and therapeutic potential in human disease. Dr. Peng has published many high-quality papers on famous journals, such as Cancer Cell, Mol Cell, Nat Commun, PNAS, Hepatology, Cell Res, and Cancer Res. Currently, Dr. Peng serves as an associate editor for Mol Cancer, and an editor for other journals, such as Cancer Lett, Cell Mol Life Sci, and Cell Stress.
Areas of expertise: Cancer, RNA, bioinformatics.
Tristan Rodríguez is a Reader in Cell and Developmental Biology at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), Imperial College London. Tristan did his PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research (London, UK) on mouse genetics and then moved to the laboratory of the late Dr. Rosa Beddington to work as a post-doctoral fellow in developmental biology. In 2002, he was awarded a Lister Institute of Medicine fellowship to become an independent investigator at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. In 2011, his lab moved to NHLI, where their research is centred on understanding the mechanisms regulating cell fitness. Specifically, this work focuses on unravelling the cell-to-cell signalling and the cell-intrinsic mechanisms that ensure that suboptimal cells are eliminated during embryonic development. Additionally, the group also studies how these mechanisms become deregulated in the adult, for example during cancer and heart disease.
Areas of expertise: Mammalian development, stem cells, growth regulation, mitochondrial biology and cell metabolism, cell signalling, cell death.
Luca Scorrano (MD, PhD, University of Padua, Italy) is Director of the Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry, Department of Biology, University of Padua (Italy). Luca became interested in mitochondrial shape during his post-doc with the late Stan Korsmeyer (Harvard Medical School), when they discovered that mitochondrial cristae remodeling was involved in cytochrome c release and apoptosis. Since 2003, his lab, first in Italy, then in Geneva (Switzerland), where he was Professor at the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism for seven years, and from 2013 in Italy again, has investigated the molecular mechanisms and pathophysiological consequences of mitochondrial dynamics and tethering to the endoplasmic reticulum. He has received several prizes and awards (including the Eppendorf European Young Investigator, the Award Chiara D’Onofrio and the ESCI Award), is an EMBO Member and sits on several committees, Advisory and Editorial Boards.
Areas of expertise: Mitochondria, fusion-fission, apoptosis, autophagy, neurodegeneration, mouse models.