Jonathan A. Eisen

Research Interests

Work in the Eisen lab covers a broad range of topics related to the ecology, evolution and function of microbes and microbial communities as well as science communication and participation. Some of the major recent themes of work in the lab are listed below.

• The phylogenomic basis for the origin and evolution of new functions and how this varies within and between taxa (something that can be called “evolvability”).
• The ecology, evolution and phylogenomics of microbial communities, with a major focus on wildlife and aquatic systems.
• The co-evolution of microbiomes and their carrying vessels (i.e., hosts).
• The development of phylogenomics and phylogeny-driven computational tools to analyze genomic and metagenomic sequence data.
• The application of microbiome studies to conservation biology and response to ecosystem perturbation.
• The microbiology of the built environment (human constructed environments).

Another major interest in my group is in scientific and scholarly communication. I am deeply committed to the opening up of scholarly communication such as by improving access to literature, data, and tools and also by communicating more with the public outside of the "normal" scholarly literature through blogging, social media, and other means.

Center Affiliations

• Genome Center
• Center for Population Biology

Graduate Program Affiliations

• Population Biology Graduate Group
• Biophysics Graduate Group
• Integrative Genetics and Genomics Graduate Group