Pilar Francino
Pilar Francino obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Biology at the National University of Mexico. She then pursued her graduate studies in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Program at the University of Rochester (NY), where she worked with Howard Ochman on analyses of rates and patterns of DNA sequence evolution in bacteria and primates. After obtaining her PhD in 1999, she conducted postdoctoral research in bacterial genetics as an EMBO Fellow at the University of Paris, in the laboratory of Miroslav Radman. Pilar came to California as a Research Scientist at the DOE Joint Genome Institute in 2002, and became Head of the Evolutionary Genomics Program in 2007. Research in her group applies an ecological and evolutionary perspective to genome analyses, with the aim of better understanding the forces that shape the structure, organization and evolution of genomes.
