Affiliation: University of Galway
Keywords: Evolution, EvoDevo, Chromatin, Gene regulation
Full profile: James received his PhD in Biochemistry from University of Galway in Ireland in 2016. Following this, he spent 5 years as a Postdoc in the Michael Sars Centre at the University of Bergen in Norway where he worked on chromatin regulation in the nervous system of the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis. He then received a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral fellowship from the Welcome Trust to work on chromatin-based gene regulation in Choanoflagellates and was based at the University of Oxford, UK. In addition, he spent 1 year as a visiting scholar in UCSF. In 2023, James was awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council and, since April 2024, is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Chromosome Biology in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at the University of Galway.
James’s team work on understanding gene regulation in two evolutionary-interesting groups. Firstly, they work on cnidarians (jellyfish, sea anemones etc) where they dissect gene regulation during development and neurogenesis. Cnidarians are the sister group to bilaterian animals and therefore provide insights into early animal evolution. The group also works on choanoflagellates, the closest unicellular group to animals. They dissect the regulation of chromatin and gene expression in this clade to decipher how changes in these processes may have contributed to the emergence of animals.