Six new members have been elected to the User Executive Committee (UEC) of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). They are: Ivan Baxter of the Danforth Center, Sundy Maurice of the University of Oslo, Aaron Robinson of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Rebecca Smith of the University of Wisconsin, Maggie Sogin of the University of California, Merced, and Kevin Solomon of the University of Delaware. Along with the existing UEC members, their areas of study span the research interests of the JGI’s user community. Go here to view the current UEC roster.
- Baxter is a principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, where his group focuses on interactions underlying plant adaptation in different environments. He’s been involved in several plant genome projects through the Community Science Program. As a UEC member, he’s interested in finding ways to boost visibility of the CSP to encourage more plant proposals and provide feedback on pangenome tool development.
- Maurice is a fungal evolutionary ecologist with interests in understanding which processes change biodiversity, and how these changes affect the dynamics and functioning of ecosystems. She leads a recently approved CSP New Investigator proposal to understand the genetic basis of fungal community assembly on dead wood decomposition. She’s also participated in the 1000 Fungal Genomes Project and has an interest in cross-disciplinary collaborations. On the UEC she intends to represent the user community by providing input on JGI policies and capabilities that affect users.
- Robinson is a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. With a background in fungal genetics and evolution, he helps manage the Bacterial-Fungal Interactions Science Focus Area. He has partnered with the JGI through several user programs. He’s also bringing his fungal genetics expertise and experience as a primarily fungal genomics user, he aims to help align JGI policies with broader DOE mission goals.
- Smith is an assistant professor of translational plant science for dairy sustainability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a co-investigator in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Her research focus is genetically engineering the plant cell wall to address dairy sustainability challenges. She’s worked with the JGI on poplar and sorghum projects, specifically for generating libraries of large gene families to understand enzyme activity. As another early career researcher on the UEC, she is interested in creating opportunities for others and being a liaison to her institution and Bioenergy Research Centers.
- Sogin is a microbial ecologist at UC Merced, where her group focuses on the interactions between seagrasses, considered marine flowering plants, and their microbiomes. She is exploring the seagrass rhizosphere in her ongoing CSP New Investigator proposal. As an early career researcher, she aims to help connect new scientists to JGI user programs and help advocate for programs that will support the emerging careers of ERCs. She’s also interested in developing or improving bioinformatics tools that can help with dataset analysis, as well as how they can be shared with and used by students.
- Solomon is an associate professor at the University of Delaware. His lab is interested in how microbial communities can efficiently degrade complex polymers that are not easy to break down, as well as developing synthetic biology tools that can help produce value-added products from these systems. He’s worked with the JGI on various CSP and FICUS collaborative science proposals. One of his interests as a UEC member is increasing user program participation from researchers at non-R1 institutions, now defined as those that don’t spend $50 million in annual research and don’t award at least 70 research doctorates a year.
Coinciding with the election results, Roland Hatzenpichler, Teresa Pawlowska, and Jana U’Ren completed their service on the UEC.
The UEC represents the JGI user community and is responsible for providing input and advice on JGI policies and practices that affect users and their access to technical capabilities JGI offers, as well as proposal review procedures and the organization of the JGI Annual Meeting. Any investigator who has been an active user of the JGI at any time in the past two fiscal years is eligible for election to the UEC. Members serve three-year terms and can serve no more than two consecutive terms.
