Arash Bashirullah

Arash Bashirullah will step down from his role as Senior Advisory Editor at GENETICS.

Arash was appointed in January 2026 as Dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Houston. Editor in Chief Howard Lipshitz and the Editorial Board express their sincere thanks to Arash for providing wise advice and insights to the EIC, the senior editors, and the senior staff over the past three-and-a-half years and wish him much success.

Lynn Cooley

Special Consulting Editor

Lynn Cooley attended Connecticut College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in Zoology. She went to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin but found her way to the lab of Dieter Söll at Yale University to carry out her dissertation research on tRNA transcription and processing. She received a PhD in Chemistry from UT Austin for her research at Yale. Cooley carried out postdoctoral training at the Carnegie Institution of Science Department of Embryology in Baltimore, MD. As a postdoc, she developed the first large-scale mutagenesis screen in Drosophila using single P transposable elements as the mutagen, which greatly accelerated cloning of affected genes. She started her own research program at the Yale University School of Medicine in 1989 with molecular analysis of two mutations slowing egg growth during oogenesis causing female sterility. This led to significant new insight into the regulation of the actin cytoskeleton in vivo. Currently, Cooley’s research is focused on the formation and function of intercellular bridges called ring canals that connect cells of the germline lineage as they form gametes. Similar ring canals are present in germline cells throughout the animal kingdom, and the Drosophila system provides an excellent model for investigating ring canals and their biogenesis. She is also investigating the surprising discovery in her lab that many Drosophila mRNAs undergo stop codon readthrough resulting in the production of unexpectedly long proteins. Stop codon readthrough is particularly efficient in nerves of the central nervous system, suggesting the elongated proteins have new functions in the brain.

Cooley served as the Director of Yale’s Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) before being appointed as Dean of Yale Graduate School in 2014 and Vice Provost for Postdoctoral Affairs in 2021. She recently served as GSA Vice President and then President. She is the recipient of a Pew Scholar Award, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

Sushma Naithani 

Associate Editor
Computational Resources, Software, and Databases

Sushma Naithani is an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. She received an MS in Biotechnology and a PhD in Botany. During her postdoc at Iowa State University and Cornell University, she investigated organelle biogenesis in unicellular cyanobacteria (Synechocystis) and yeast and later focused on self-incompatibility mechanisms in Brassica. Her current research focuses on plant genome and transcriptome analysis, biocuration, and the development of open-source plant genomic and pathway resources. She is the Lead Biocurator and Principal Investigator of the Plant Reactome knowledgebase. Additionally, Naithani plays a pivotal role in developing FAIR genomic data policy. She is a Steering Committee member of the AgBioData Consortium and previously served as an elected Executive Committee member of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB). She served as Editor-in-Chief of Current Plant Biology (2017–2023), Associate Editor for Frontiers in Plant Science, and Guest Editor for Current Opinion in Plant Biology. She is a recipient of the 2025 AgBioData Mission and Leadership Award, ISB’s Excellence in Biocuration 2024 Award, and the Sustained Research Parasitism (aka the Merozoite) 2024 Award presented by the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, GigaByte, and GigaScience.

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