Speakers: Christine Elsik, PhD
Christine Elsik, PhD
Associate Professor
Divisions of Animal and Plant Sciences
University of Missouri
Christine Elsik is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Divisions of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri. Her graduate training in plant genomics led to a PhD in Genetics from Texas A&M University. She then pursued bioinformatics at the University of Virginia with an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Molecular Biology. She shifted focus to genome annotation and database development during her first faculty position at Texas A&M University, where she initiated the Bovine Genome Database and BeeBase (honey bee genome database) projects. She led the international efforts to annotate the bovine and honey bee genomes, and has participated in several other genome sequencing projects (e.g. sea urchin, beetle, body louse, parasitoid wasp, termite, ants and bumble bees). Her group continues to develop genome databases (Bovine Genome Database, Hymenoptera Genome Database and MaizeMine), and contributes to development of the web-based genome annotation tool, Apollo.