My lab is primarily interested in molecular evolution, particularly of early life, early genomes and of the eukaryote cell. We use both experimental and computational approaches in our work.

If you are a student or postdoc and potentially interested in joining our lab, I'd be happy to hear from you. Our lab spans team members who work fully computationally, fully experimentally, and everything in between.


Personal Bio:
After completing a BSc (Hons) at Massey University, I spent two years as a Japanese Government Monbusho scholar at the University of Tokyo in the laboratory of Prof. Yoshiki Hotta. I completed a Licentiate degree at Stockholm University, Sweden, with Prof. Britt-Marie Sjöberg on the origin of DNA, and a PhD at Massey University, with Prof. David Penny, studying the evolutionary origin of cellular life. Following postdoctoral work at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, my first position was as a Swedish Research Council-funded Assistant Professor at Stockholm University, where I also received a Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Research Fellowship. I subsequently moved to the University of Canterbury as a lecturer in Genetics. During that time, I served as Director of the Biomolecular Interaction Centre before taking up a Professorship in 2017 at the University of Auckland.


Distinctions/Honours:
President, New Zealand Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology 2014-2017

Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Discovery Fellow 2011

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Research Fellow 2007

Swedish Research Council Assistant Professor 2002

Japanese Government Monbusho Scholar 1995


Responsibilities:
Director, Bioinformatics Institute

Academic Lead, Auckland Genomics


Areas of Expertise:
Molecular evolution

Comparative genomics

Evolutionary bioinformatics