Mike McDonald

Mike completed at PhD in Evolutionary Genetics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Massy University in New Zealand in 2009. After that he took up a Distinguished Postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Molecular Biology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. In 2012 Mike moved to the USA to take up a Postdoctoral fellow ship in the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University.

Mike is interested in the genetics of adaptation. To study this question, his lab propagates populations of yeast (and other microbes) for 1000's of generations in a variety of laboratory environments. Microbes grow and divide very quickly, providing a means for directly observing evolution as it happens. The goal is to understand how organisms adapt to better fit their environment. We do this by finding the mutations that cause adaptation, determining how these mutations change the genetic program of the cell and trying to predict how organisms will respond to environmental change. Mikes lab employs methods such as high throughput robotic liquid handling, whole genome sequencing and molecular genetic techniques.