Dana Price

Dr. Price is an Associate Research Professor at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. His research focuses on microbial eukaryote evolution, systematics, taxonomy and functional genomics. Using genome data generated by the SEBS Genome Cooperative, which he directs, he employs bioinformatic pipelines and high-performance computing resources available at SEBS and throughout Rutgers to elucidate the biology, ecology and life histories of organisms through analysis of their genomes. His current projects range from reconstructing ancestral metabolic pathways of toxic dinoflagellates to identifying the microbiome content and associated viromes of vector arthropods including mosquitoes and ticks. He also performs systematic and phylogenetic analyses to compare, contrast, annotate and place genome fragments collected from eclectic mixtures of environmental DNAs in the Tree of Life (ToL). These data, even sampled from closely related organisms, can exhibit unique patterns of genomic divergence that yield important insights into how hosts interact with their own microbiomes and the surrounding environment. He has a broad background in high-performance computing, and enjoys using current technology to answer problems in evolutionary biology.

January 2019