| Ginger Armbrust is Professor and Director, School of Oceanography, University of Washington. Her research approaches are both lab- and field-based, aimed at uncovering the complexities surrounding diatoms, their environment, and their interactions with other microbes. She and her research group work at cellular, population, and community scales to understand how these organisms shape and are shaped by environmental conditions. |
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| Ford Doolittle is a Professor Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University. His research focuses on the evolution of genes and genomes, both experimentally using molecular genetics and genomics, but also on a theoretical level. His work has led to a re-writing of the tree of life, deepening our understanding of genome evolution, and to theoretical concepts such as ‘you are what you eat’, selfish DNA, and constructive neutrality. |
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| Alastair G.B. Simpson is an Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, and the winner of the 2013 Hutner Award of The International Society of Protistologists, a prestigious award for a young researcher. His research examines the biodiversity of free-living protozoa, and the early evolutionary history of eukaryotic cells using electron microscopy and molecular phylogenetic methods. |
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| Geoffrey McFadden is Professor and Director of The Plant Cell Biology Research Centre, School of Botany, University of Melbourne, Australia. He and his research group discovered that the malaria parasite contains a relict plastid, an unorthodox phenomenon for a parasite. They are now exploring the role of this plastid in the life history of Plasmodium, aiming to use their discoveries to fight this deadly disease. |
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| Eric Meyer is Group Leader of the Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire, École Normale Supiérieure, Paris. He and his research group are probing the functional specialization and developmental program of genome assembly in Paramecium as a model eukaryote. |
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