Judith Elizabeth Mank | |
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Born | 1976 (age 47–48) |
Alma mater | University of Georgia University of Florida Pennsylvania State University |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of Oxford University College London University of British Columbia |
Thesis | The evolution of reproductive and genomic diversity in ray-finned fishes (2006) |
Judith Elizabeth Mank is an American-British-Canadian zoologist who is a Canada 150 Chair at the University of British Columbia. She studies how evolution produces variation in animals. She is interested in sexual dimorphism and the formation of sex chromosomes.
Mank studied anthropology at the University of Florida. [1] She moved to Pennsylvania State University for graduate studies, joining the School of Forest Resources. [1] After completing her master's degree she moved to the University of Georgia for doctoral research with John Avise. Her research focused on reproductive diversity in fish. [2] [3]
Following her postdoctoral work at Uppsala University, Mank was a lecturer at the University of Oxford from 2008-2012, and then professor at University College London from 2012-2018. [4] She joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia in 2018 as a professor and Canada 150 Chair in Evolutionary Genomics. [5] Her research includes the evolution of sex chromosomes and the genetics underlying sex differences. [6] Her work has revealed fundamental properties of the earliest stages of Y chromosomes formation. [7] Mank makes use of genomic data to understand how ecological factors, such as sexual selection, effect genome evolution, and how sex differences are encoded within the genome. She has studied the genetics of female mate preference in guppies, and how this affects the diversity and genetics of pigmentation in males. [8]
Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes. During sexual reproduction, a male and a female gamete fuse to form a zygote, which develops into an offspring that inherits traits from each parent. By convention, organisms that produce smaller, more mobile gametes are called male, while organisms that produce larger, non-mobile gametes are called female. An organism that produces both types of gamete is hermaphrodite.
Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity.
A sex-determination system is a biological system that determines the development of sexual characteristics in an organism. Most organisms that create their offspring using sexual reproduction have two common sexes and a few less common intersex variations.
The Y chromosome is one of two sex chromosomes in therian mammals and other organisms. Along with the X chromosome, it is part of the XY sex-determination system, in which the Y is the sex-determining because it is the presence or absence of Y chromosome that determines the male or female sex of offspring produced in sexual reproduction. In mammals, the Y chromosome contains the SRY gene, which triggers development of male gonads. The Y chromosome is passed only from male parents to male offspring.
In biology, gonochorism is a sexual system where there are two sexes and each individual organism is either male or female. The term gonochorism is usually applied in animal species, the vast majority of which are gonochoric.
The XO sex-determination system is a system that some species of insects, arachnids, and mammals use to determine the sex of offspring. In this system, there is only one sex chromosome, referred to as X. Males only have one X chromosome (XO), while females have two (XX). The letter O signifies the lack of a Y chromosome. Maternal gametes always contain an X chromosome, so the sex of the animals' offspring depends on whether a sex chromosome is present in the male gamete. Its sperm normally contains either one X chromosome or no sex chromosomes at all.
An organism's sex is female if it produces the ovum, the type of gamete that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.
John Charles Avise is an American evolutionary geneticist, conservationist, natural historian, and prolific science author. He is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolution, University of California, Irvine, and was previously a Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of Georgia.
Sarah Perin Otto is a theoretical biologist, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution, and is currently a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. From 2008-2016, she was the director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Otto was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2015 the American Society of Naturalists gave her the Sewall Wright Award for fundamental contributions to the unification of biology. In 2021, she was awarded the Darwin–Wallace Medal for contributing major advances to the mathematical theory of evolution.
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Melissa A. Wilson is an evolutionary and computational biologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies the evolution of sex chromosomes.
Barbara Ruben Migeon was an American geneticist who was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Institute of Genetic Medicine. She founded the Johns Hopkins program in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology. Migeon is the author of Females are Mosaics: X inactivation and sex differences in disease. She was awarded the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Dimes/Colonel Harland D. Sanders Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.
The Drosophila immigrans species group is a polyphyletic and speciose lineage of Drosophila flies, including over 100 species. Immigrans species belong to the Immigrans-tripunctata radiation of the subgenus Drosophila. Well-described species include Drosophila immigrans, and the sister species Drosophila albomicans and Drosophila nasuta. The genome of D. albomicans was sequenced in 2012 in an effort to characterize novel sex chromosome development in D. albomicans. Immigrans group species are related to mushroom-breeding Drosophila of the Quinaria and Testacea species groups.
Judith Anne Blake is a computational biologist at the Jackson Laboratory and Professor of Mammalian Genetics.
Patricia M. Schulte is a Canadian zoologist who is a Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Her research considers physiology, genomics and population genetics. Schulte is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the former President of the Canadian Society of Zoologists.
Paula Elaine Cohen is a British-American geneticist who is a professor and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. Her research considers DNA repair mechanisms and the regulation of crossing over during mammalian meiosis. She was awarded the National Down Syndrome Society Charles J. Epstein Down Syndrome Research Award in 2004 and elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021.
Siv Gun Elisabeth Andersson is a Swedish evolutionary biologist, professor of molecular evolution at Uppsala University. She is member of both the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of Engineering. She is also Head of basic research at the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and has been co-director of the Swedish national center for large-scale research Science for Life Laboratory between 2017 and 2021. Her research focuses on the evolution of bacteria, mainly on intracellular parasites.
Henry HQ Heng is a professor of molecular medicine and genetics and of pathology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine. Heng first received his PhD from the University of Toronto Hospital for Sick Children in 1994, mentored by Lap-Chee Tsui. He then completed his post-doc under Peter Moens at York University, before joining the Wayne State University School of Medicine faculty.
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