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Gota Morota, Associate Editor

Gota Morota is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Biology at the University of Tokyo, where he works on quantitative genetics and phenomics with applications in animal and plant breeding. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical approaches for the inference and prediction of complex traits in agricultural species using high-dimensional omic data. He is also interested in applying digital phenotyping technologies to generate novel phenotypes for genetic analysis. Morota began his career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Animal Science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln before moving to Virginia Tech, where he served as an assistant professor and later an associate professor. He completed his BS in Agricultural Science at Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine and earned his PhD in Quantitative Genetics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Sean Ryder, Associate Editor

Sean Ryder graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. He studied the mechanisms of RNA folding and catalysis in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, earning a PhD in 2001. He performed post-doctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute, where he was awarded a Damon Runyon fellowship to study post-transcriptional regulation and RNP assembly. He joined the faculty of University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in 2005, where his lab studies maternal mRNA regulation in the C. elegans germline. He is a member of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, where he serves as Vice Chair of Outreach. He is committed to fostering understanding and friendships between scientists and the community that supports our work. In 2025, he published the book “Everyday RNA,” an introductory RNA textbook on RNA medicine written for non-specialists.

Guillaume Ramstein, Associate Editor

Guillaume Ramstein is a quantitative geneticist working on the prediction of variant effects and genotype-by-environment interactions in grass species. His research consists of using methods from statistics, machine learning, and comparative genomics to understand the effect of genetic variation on fitness and crop adaptation. He also works on the experimental validation of variant effect predictions, using targeted and untargeted mutagenesis techniques. Guillaume received a PhD in plant breeding and plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then did a postdoc on maize and sorghum genomics at Cornell University. Since 2021, he has been a tenure-track assistant professor at the Center for Quantitative Genetics and Genomics, at Aarhus University in Denmark.

GENETICS

Juan Lucas Argueso, Associate Editor

Genome Integrity and Transmission Section

Juan Lucas Argueso is a professor of Radiation and Cancer Biology at Colorado State University. His research program investigates broad aspects of structural genomic variation in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae model system. His work spans from basic mechanisms of genome rearrangement through homologous recombination, to the phenotypic consequences of chromosome-scale mutations. Argueso started doing applied genetics research in yeast while he was a freshman undergraduate at University of Sao Paulo, where he earned a BSc in Agronomic Engineering and a MSc in Genetics and Plant Breeding. He then joined the DNA repair and genomic instability fields through a PhD in Genetics and Development at Cornell University, followed by related post-doctoral training at Duke University.

Tim Connallon, Associate Editor

Theoretical Population and Evolutionary Genetics Section

Tim’s research focuses on evolutionary genetics, with an emphasis on mathematical modelling of evolutionary patterns and processes. Tim received a BA from Rutgers University and a PhD from the University of Michigan and has been a research and teaching academic at Monash University since 2014. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. 

Elizabeth Heckscher, Associate Editor

Neurogenetics and Behavior Section

Ellie Heckscher is a developmental biologist by training and has been working on problems in motor systems for decades. She conducted her postdoctoral training with Chris Q. Doe at the University of Oregon, where she helped develop Drosophila larvae into a model system for studying motor circuit assembly. She is particularly interested in how complex motor circuits form, function, and evolve. Ellie has a particular fondness for neural stem cells, muscles, and maggots. She is currently an associate professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago.

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