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Editor biographies
Editor-in-Chief
Dan is Associate Professor in the Center for Precision Environmental Health and Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, USA. He is also Director of the Zebrafish Advanced Technology Core Facility. Dan received his PhD in Cellular & Molecular Medicine in the lab of Peter Agre at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He did a postdoc in developmental biology and endocrinology in the lab of Marnie Halpern at the Carnegie Institution for Science. During this time, Dan spent a year as an American Association for the Advancement of Science policy fellow at the US Department of State. In 2012, he started his lab at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, USA. In 2018, he moved to the Baylor College of Medicine. He received the National Institutes of Health Outstanding New Environmental Scientist award. Dan’s lab studies how endocrine-disrupting chemicals and related toxicants influence embryonic development.
Areas of expertise: Developmental biology, cell signalling, zebrafish genetics, steroid signalling, toxicology.
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.
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.
Editors
Alissa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina, USA. She received a master’s degree in biology from the College of William and Mary where she investigated sperm-oocyte membrane interactions in Caenorhabditis elegans in the lab of Diane Shakes. For her doctoral studies in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University, she investigated the role of neurotrophin and Wnt signaling in mouse sympathetic nervous development in the lab of Rejji Kuruvilla. She carried out postdoctoral studies in the lab of Daniela Drummond-Barbosa, then at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she uncovered that nutrient-sensing pathway activity in adipocytes regulates the ovarian germline stem cell lineage in Drosophila melanogaster. In 2016, Alissa started her lab continuing investigation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate adipose tissue communication about nutritional input to the ovary. She has a long-standing commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Alissa is a co-PI for the University of South Carolina’s Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program and staff and mentor for SC-Advancing Diversity in Aging Research Program (both NIH-sponsored R25 programs). Additionally, she is part of the core leadership team for PAIR-UP (Partnering to Advance Imaging Research for Underrepresented Minority Scientists Program). In 2022, she was selected as a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Science Diversity Leadership Investigator.
Areas of expertise: Oogenesis, development, stem cells, adipose tissue, nutrient sensing signaling pathways, Drosophila genetics.
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, anthropology, behaviour, comparative physiology, diving, ecophysiology, energetics, metabolism.
Marjorie is Senior Research Fellow in Plant Environmental Physiology at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. She did her PhD with Prof. Colin Osborne at the University of Sheffield, UK on using intraspecific photosynthetic diversity to understand complex trait evolution. She did post-doctoral work with Prof. Pascal-Antoine Christin and Prof. Andrew Fleming at the University of Sheffield and David Des Marais at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while also a fellow of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. She was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2018 and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2021. Her research group focuses on understanding and utilising natural photosynthetic diversity as inspiration for crop improvement.
Areas of expertise: photosynthetic diversity, carbon concentrating mechanisms, agricultural biotechnology, leaf anatomy, biogeography, plant environmental physiology.
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.
Lauren is a lecturer in Marine Biology and Ecology within the School of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton, and is based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton. Her research uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand how the behaviour and physiology of marine organisms interact to create the complex interactions that we see in the underwater world. She earned her PhD from James Cook University (Australia) and completed postdoctoral research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (Norway). She runs the Nadler Marine Behaviour and Physiology Lab in Southampton.
Areas of expertise: Areas of expertise: Animal behaviour, ecophysiology, host-parasite interactions, climate change, fish biology, coral reef ecology, estuarine ecology.
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.
