Congratulations to Dr. Lenore Pipes, principal investigator of the Pipes Lab and assistant professor at the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, who has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR Research Fellows Award.
The fellowship will support her work developing new computational methods to recover biological information from ancient DNA preserved in deep-sea sediments. Because ancient environmental DNA is often highly fragmented and damaged, distinguishing DNA degradation from true evolutionary differences can be challenging.
Dr. Pipes’ project aims to develop methods that account for this damage and enable more accurate reconstruction of past marine communities. This work will help provide historical baselines for understanding how ocean biodiversity has changed over time and how marine ecosystems respond to climate change..