Eugene Koonin - “The Expanding World of Viruses and its Evolution”

“The Expanding World of Viruses and its Evolution”

Eugene Koonin

National Center for Biotechnology Information, NIH

Speaker Bio:
Eugene V. Koonin is and NIH Distinguished Investigator and the leader of the Evolutionary Genomics Group at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the NIH. He is known primarily for his research on genome evolution, especially in microbes and viruses, host-parasite coevolution, and more specifically, functions and evolution of CRISPR-Cas systems. Koonin received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in 1983 from the Department of Biology, Moscow State University. He was a research scientist at the Institute of Poliomyelitis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and subsequently, a senior research scientist and laboratory chief at the Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Koonin joined the NCBI in 1991 as a Visiting Scientist and became a Senior Investigator in 1996. He is the author of “The Logic of Chance: The nature and origin of biological evolution” (2011) and the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Biology Direct, an Open Access, open peer-review journal. Koonin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Academy of Microbiology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, a Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization, a Foreign Member of Academia Europea, and Doctor Honoris Causa of Universite Aix-Marseille (France) and Wageningen University (The Netherlands).

Host: Judith Frydman and Dmitri Petrov