Jesse Shapiro
Associate Professor
NOT ACCEPTING GRADUATE STUDENTS
Jesse Shapiro did his undergrad in Biology at McGill, followed by an MSc in Integrative Bioscience at Oxford. He then completed a PhD in Computational and Systems Biology at MIT with Eric Alm, where he developed methods to detect signatures of natural selection, recombination, and speciation in bacterial genomes. He went on to a postdoc with Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute and Harvard University, where he studied the evolutionary genomics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Lassa virus. After seven years as Canada Research Chair in Microbial Evolutionary Genomics at Université de Montréal, he returned to McGill as an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Genome Centre.
Canada Research Chair in Microbial Evolutionary Genomics (2013-2020)
Jesse’s research uses genomics to understand the ecology and evolution of microbes, ranging from freshwater bacterioplankton to the human gut microbiome. His work has helped elucidate the origins of bacterial species, leading to a more unified species concept across domains of life, and has developed genome-wide association study (GWAS) methods tailored for bacteria. He is particularly interested in pathogen evolution, and their evolution within patients, and interactions with members of the resident microbiome. His laboratory currently has projects on the ecology and evolution of toxic cyanobacterial blooms, cholera infections, and antimicrobial resistance, among others.