Jonathan Andrew Eisen (born August 31, 1968) is an American evolutionary biologist, currently working at

University of California, Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Davis, California, United States. It is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University ...

. His academic research is in the fields of

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biolo ...

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, ...

and

microbiology Microbiology () is the branches of science, scientific study of microorganisms, those being of unicellular organism, unicellular (single-celled), multicellular organism, multicellular (consisting of complex cells), or non-cellular life, acellula ...

and he is the academic editor-in-chief of the

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

journal '' PLOS Biology''.

Education

Eisen completed his undergraduate studies at

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...

in 1990, earning an AB degree in biology. He graduated as a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in 1998 with a thesis on the evolution of DNA repair genes, proteins, and processes in 1998, supervised by Philip Hanawalt.

Research

Eisen's research focuses on the origin of novelty, how new processes and functions originate in living things. To study this, he focuses on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis. Eisen, together with Nick Barton, Derek E.G. Briggs, David B. Goldstein, and Nipam H. Patel, authored the undergraduate textbook, ''Evolution'', that integrates molecular biology, genomics, and human genetics with traditional evolutionary studies. According to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

his most cited peer-reviewed papers are on the genome sequence of ''

Plasmodium falciparum ''Plasmodium falciparum'' is a Unicellular organism, unicellular protozoan parasite of humans and is the deadliest species of ''Plasmodium'' that causes malaria in humans. The parasite is transmitted through the bite of a female ''Anopheles'' mos ...

'', sequencing the Sargasso Sea and a paper on the genome of '' Thermotoga maritima''. Prior to working at UC Davis he was an Investigator at The Institute for Genomic Research. Eisen and his work is routinely discussed in the scientific and popular press. Examples include a New York Times article on the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea in 2009 and extensive coverage of work on searching for a "fourth domain" of life. In addition, Eisen's blogging and microblogging work is frequently written about. His brother

Michael Eisen Michael Bruce Eisen (born April 13, 1967) is an American computational biologist and the former editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He is a professor of genetics, genomics and Developmental biology, development at University of California, Berkel ...

is also a biologist.

Awards and honors

Eisen was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award (Bioinformatics) in 2011 and the Esquire Magazine's Best and Brightest in 2002.The Maverick – Esquire
He was awarded the Walter J. Gores Award, Faculty Achievement Awards for Excellence in Teaching. He was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology (FAAM). He was awarded the UC Davis ADVANCE Scholar Award in 2019, for his work to improve gender equity in STEM through teaching, research, and service.

References

External links

Jonathan Eisen's Lab
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Eisen, Jonathan Living people 21st-century American biologists American bioinformaticians Harvard College alumni Stanford University alumni University of California, Davis faculty Articles containing video clips American scientists Fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology 1968 births