Michael D. Purugganan (Principal Investigator)
Michael obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of the Philippines in 1985. He began his graduate work at Columbia in empirical and theoretical biophysical chemistry, obtaining an MA before moving to the University of Georgia where he completed a Ph.D. in Botany (minor in Global Policy Studies) in 1993. After a two year Alfred P. Sloan Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Diego, he joined the faculty at NC State. He was promoted to associate professor in 2001. In 2005, he became a William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics and elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Michaels research interests include the molecular evolution and ecology of development, the nature of adaptation at the molecular level, and the evolutionary genetics of plant domestication. He seems to be distressingly fond of black clothing preferably Armani.
email: mp132@nyu.eduJonathan M. Flowers (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Jonathan completed his Ph.D. research on studies of gene expression in hybrids and studies of molecular evolution under the supervision of Dr. Ronald S. Burton at the University of California San Diego in 2005. He then conducted a two-year post-doc in the laboratory of Walter Eanes at Stony Brook University, where he used metabolic engineering and population genetics in Drosophila to address fundamental problems in metabolic adaptation. Since joining the Purugganan lab at NYU, Jonathan has published studies on the evolution of the Arabidopsis flowering-time gene network, the consequences of natural and artificial selection on genomic patterns of variation in rice, and the first large scale resequencing study of Dictyostelium discoideum. He is currently using whole genome resequencing data to characterize metabolic variation in Chlamydomonas and date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) to address applied problems in biofuel and crop improvement. His current work is in collaboration with researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi.
email: jmf11@nyu.eduUlises Rosas (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Ulises got his BSc degree in Biology at UNAM in Mexico City. His undergrad dissertation focused on the ecological implications of anatomy and physiology in cacti. After years of walking the Mexican deserts, he exchanged his poncho and sombrero for wellington boots and umbrella and moved to the UK. In Norwich, he got his MSc in Plant Breeding and Biotechnology at the University of East Anglia. After that, he joined the John Innes Centre as a grad student under the supervision of Prof. Enrico Coen. His PhD dissertation focused on cryptic natural variation in snapdragon, particularly on the flower symmetry developmental network. After finishing his PhD, he moved to the US to take a break from plant research and spend some months in Trisha Wittkopps lab, torturing flies and studying the genetics of pigmentation. In April 2010, Ulises joined the Purugganan lab. He is interested in the evolution of developmental networks and their adaptive implications. For that he will explore transcriptomic approaches for the study of adaptive natural variation and epistasis in Arabidopsis.
email: ur6@nyu.eduRachel Meyer (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Rachel completed her doctorate under the supervision of Dr. Amy Litt in the City University of New York and New York Botanical Garden Joint PhD Program in Biology in 2012, with a thesis on the domestication history and molecular, chemical, and ethnobotanical diversity of eggplant and related nightshades. Her undergraduate degrees include a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Visual Art and a B.S. in Plant Biology, both from the University of Washington in Seattle. In her current position as an NSF Plant Genome Postdoctoral Fellow in the Purugganan lab she is investigating the evolution of salt tolerance in African rice through genome-wide analyses and documenting West African agricultural practices to better understand selection.
email: rm181@nyu.educurriculum vitae: download
Anne Plessis (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Anne did her PhD in France, from 2005 to 2008 at the national institute for agronomical research (INRA) in Versailles, working on Arabidopsis mutants that were more tolerant to water deficit. After that she stayed in Versailles for a short while to study pea leaf development and architecture. She then moved to another INRA research center, at Clermont-Ferrand, to investigate how the synthesis of wheat grain storage proteins was regulated. At this point, she decided that she had seen enough of France and should have a look at how research is done in another country. That is one reason why she joined the Purugganan lab in october 2012. Her project there is to look into rice transcriptomics in the field. As Greenwich Village is not the best place to grow rice, she is collaborating with the IRRI in the Philippines.
email: ap133@nyu.eduOlivia Wilkins (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Olivia completed her PhD research on transcriptional responses to drought and time of day signals in poplar trees and in arabidopsis in Dr. Malcolm Campbell's lab at the University of Toronto in 2009. She joined the Purugganan lab in October 2011 as an NSERC post-doctoral fellow. Her research aims to connect metabolic and phenotypic phenomena to environment-induced transcriptional responses by learning gene regulatory interaction networks in rice and arabidopsis. To this end, she has conducted a large-scale experiment at IRRI in the Philippines and has made extensive use of publically available data sets. She works in close collaboration with Rich Bonneau's lab at NYU, and with scientists at the Australian National University and at IRRI.
email: ow9@nyu.eduGoogle Scholar: click here
Khaled Hazzouri (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Khaled completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in the laboratory of Dr. Stephen Wright studying mating system evolution in Capsella and Collinsia. Khaled joined the Purugganan lab at NYU Abu Dhabi in July 2012 where he is now working on origin and spread of domesticated date palms.
email: kmh10@nyu.eduInês ires (Ph.D. Candidate)
Inês completed, in 2009, her MSc in Biological Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico – Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (IST-UTL), Portugal, under the supervision of Isabel Sá-Correia from IST-UTL and Pascale Daran-Lapujade from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. During 2010, Inês decided for research instead of industry, and worked as a molecular biologist at Genomics of Plant Stress Laboratory in Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. In the beginning of 2011, she became a PhD student at the same institute while collaborating with the Purugganan Laboratory at Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University, USA. Currently she is interested in the phylogeny of key salt tolerance genes as a way to better understand how salt tolerance evolved among the plant kingdom, with a special focus on rice crop.
email: isp2@nyu.eduWei Yuan (Ph.D. Candidate)
Wei got her B.Sc in Biology from China Agricultural University in 2009. Throughout her years in college, she always found herself fascinated by the complexity of all types of life forms, especially plants. After gaining research experience in plant evo-devo and developmental genetics, she ended up in the legendary city of New York, and the legendary Purugganan Lab. Right now Wei is engaged in a few extremely cool things: first of all her research project of developing a new technique in Arabidopsis thaliana, namely the xQTL mapping technique, to better investigate the chromosomal regions that are related to specific natural variations in plants; secondly Wei is happily pressured to rock climb by Gina, and on weekends she is exploring the cultural richness that NYC offers, including the artistic underground scenes...
email: wy313@nyu.eduGina Pham (Technician)
Gina studied biology at the College of New Jersey and joined the Purugganan lab in 2010. For her thesis she studied vernalization, a cold period which elicits flowering in some plants after a certain duration. She has also worked on various sequencing projects in the lab which are ongoing in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Phoenix dactylifera. Her main work is now in the 'EGRINS' project in rice which entails benchwork, organization, and general help under the supervision of Dr. Olivia Wilkins. She is particularly inspired by functional genetics and genomics, and their applications in human challenges such as crop production, medicine, and sustainability.
email: gmp294@nyu.eduRebecca Susko (Administrative Assistant)
email: rebecca.susko@nyu.eduAlumni