Joe is the PI of the lab and an Associate Professor in the Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UO. He has been working on nuclear receptor evolution since his thesis work at the American Museum of Natural History and his postdoctoral work at Columbia University. Before that he was the research coordinator for Greenpeace’s U.S. and international toxics campaigns; he got interested in receptor evolution while working on endocrine disruption by pesticides and other synthetic chemicals. In addition to doing science, he still writes, lectures, and advises environmental organizations on chemical pollution and health. Joe was an undergraduate English major and didn't take a biology course until he was 30.

Jamie, a former NIH/NRSA fellow, is currently working mainly on the evolution of glucocorticoid/ mineralo-corticoid receptor specificity, but she has a hand in most of the lab's molecular projects in one way or another. Jamie completed her Ph.D. at Notre Dame, working with Alan Johnson on the function and evolution of death receptors involved in apoptosis.

Jennifer, an NIH/NRSA fellow, is establishing an experimental evolution system in yeast to study how receptors evolve affinity for new ligands. Jennifer did her Ph.D. with John McLachlan at Tulane, where she discovered that endocrine disrupters in the environment can interfere with the symbiosis of plants and nitrogen-fixing rhizobacteria. Jennifer was also a postdoc with Craig Jordan at Northwestern , where she worked on ligand- and tissue-specific coactivators for the estrogen receptor. She is the drummer for The Fast Computers, Eugene's most elegant rock band.

Bryan is a computer scientist and phylogeneticist. He is studying the effect of evolutionary heterogeneity on current phylogenetic methods and developing new mixed-model techniques that are more accurate when the evolutionary process varies among lineages and sites. He has also done some beautiful work on the behavior of Bayesian phylogenetic methods. Bryan, a former member of our IGERT training program in Evolution, Development, and Genomics, continues to drink copious amounts of very exotic tea.

Geeta is resurrecting ancestral steroid receptors to understand the evolution of androgen, progestin, and corticoid sensitivity in early receptor lineages. She studied biochemistry, phylogenetics, and evolution at the University of Stellenbosch and the University of Cape Town and then was trained in molecular biology at the Yale School of Medicine before coming to the UO in early 2007.

Sean is a graduate student in the Biology Department and an NSF IGERT fellow. Sean is interested in how hormones and their receptors coevolve. He is studing the evolution of the glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid receptors of cartilaginous fishes. Sean is a very good frisbee player who occasionally has life-threatening bike accidents.

Jesse's Biology Honors thesis was a phylogenetic and structural analysis of the evolution of ligand-binding in the entire nuclear receptor superfamily. Jesse found that, contrary to current wisdom, the ancestral receptor was almost certainly liganded, and so-called "orphan receptors," which are not regulated by hormones and other ligands, are evolutionary novelties. Jesse is now a graduate student in the MCB program at U. Colorado.