James McInerney
Professor and Chair in Manchester, United Kingdom
James McInerney holds a Chair in Evolutionary Biology at The University of Manchester
His BSc and PhD were awarded by University College Galway. Subsequently he worked as a post-doc in the Department of Zoology at The Natural History Museum, London. In 1999 he set up the bioinformatics research group at NUI Maynooth and became the director of the Genetics and Bioinformatics degree course. In 2015, he became a Fellow of the American academy of Microbiology and also he moved his research to The University of Manchester.
In 2002, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Prof. McInerney was presented with a medal for his research at MEEGID VI and a year later he was recognized by NUI Maynooth for his research achievements when he was awarded the NUI Maynooth Young Investigator Award. In 2009, he was a guest-editor, along with Prof James Lake and Prof. Mark Ragan of a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Biology Series), which is the world’s oldest continuously-published journal. In 2011, he gave the “Ernst Mayr” Keynote lecture at the Mechanisms of Protein Evolution meeting in Denver Colorado.
He was one of the founding directors of the Irish Centre for High End Computing. He is an Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Biology Direct and The Journal of Experimental Zoology and he is a regular commentator on scientific matters on TV, Radio and in the print media.
Work in the lab is focussed on gene and genome evolution, with the emphasis at the moment on horizontal gene transfer in prokaryotes and mobile genetic elements and gene family evolution in vertebrates. In 2011, Prof. McInerney and co-authors proposed that genes should be viewed as public goods and that this viewpoint is a better perspective on organismal and genome evolution than a Tree of Life viewpoint.
Prof. McInerney has supervised 24 PhD students, been awarded Marie Curie fellowships, been funded to the tune of more than €3.5 million in direct research funding and been involved in more than €39 Million in programme grants. In addition, he has published in Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, Current Biology, TREE, Trends in Genetics, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and so on. In total he has published more than 95 articles and been an invited speaker at more than 80 conferences.