Jonathan Andrew Eisen is an American evolutionary biologist, currently working at University of California, Davis.
Education
Eisen completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard College in 1990, earning an Bachelor of Arts degree in biology. He graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University in 1998 with a thesis on the evolution of deoxyribonucleic acid repair genes, proteins, and processes in 1998, supervised by Philip Hanawalt.
Career
His academic research is in the fields of evolutionary biology, genomics and microbiology and he is the academic editor-in-chief of the open access journal PLOS Biology. Eisen"s research focuses on the origin of novelty, how new processes and functions originate in living things. To study this, he focuses on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis.
Eisen together with Nick Barton, Derek East.G. Briggs, David B. Goldstein, and Nipam H. Patel is an author of the undergraduate textbook, Evolution, that integrates molecular biology, genomics, and human genetics with traditional evolutionary studies.
According to Google Scholar his most cited peer-reviewed papers are on the genome sequence of Plasmodium falciparum, sequencing the Sargasso Sea and a paper on the genome of Thermotoga maritima. Prior to working at University of California Davis he was an Investigator at The Institute for Genomic Eisen and his work is routinely discussed in the scientific and popular press
Examples include a New York Times article on the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea in 2009 and extensive coverage of work on searching for a "fourth domain" of life. In addition, Eisen"s blogging and microblogging work is frequently written about including for example.