The mission of our laboratory is to study evolutionary processes in near real-time in systems with high stakes.
These include:
- the causes of treatment failure, when the combined forces of drugs and immunity succumb.
- the ecological and population-genetic causes of rapid diversification in microbial biofilms
- novel genetic mechanisms of adaptation to environmental stress
- the biology that underlies our revolutionary EvolvingSTEM curriculum that enables students grades 7-16 to observe and comprehend evolution with a weeklong bacterial evolution experiment.
Our lab uses various in vitro and in vivo models as well as prospective clinical sampling to study these problems, in collaboration with researchers at many leading institutions. We continue to develop new methods and implementations of high-throughput genomics to track the evolutionary process, and we build new analytical tools to enable anyone to resolve evolution-in-action.
Why join our team? You have one or more of the following traits:
- A curiosity to understand how adaptations work, and a nose for discovering them
- A passion for sharing the wonder of the evolutionary process with students of all ages
- A commitment to answering some of the greatest challenges in medicine that are problems of evolution, like antimicrobial resistance, cancer, and epidemics
- A willingness to work at the interface of wet-bench experimentation and ambitious bioinformatics, knowing that your teammates span this gamut and can help
- A love of mentorship
Various positions are open in the Cooper Lab. Please contact Vaughn for more information!