Recent Work
Cover of Structure (Cell Press)
In a recent collaboration with Joe Cockburn et al published…Postdoc Positions Available
I am looking for two highly motivated computational evolutionary biologists…Elected as Fellow of the Linnean Society
On May 21st 2017 I was officially elected as Fellow…“Minding the gaps in cellular evolution”
Our latest article we discuss some recent work from Thijis Ettema's…“Sloths’ ancestors may have crossed Atlantic”
by Chris Bunting, Senior Press Officer The family tree of the largest group of mammals—those that nourish their young with placentas—divided later than scientists previously thought, according to a new study. The findings show that one of the great mammal lineages—the xenartha group, which includes armadillos, sloths and anteaters and is today found only in…
EMBO phylogenomics course in the Amazon
I had the tremendous pleasure of teaching a very talented and motivated bunch of students on an EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation) funded course. The course was delivered in the amazon jungle city of Iquitos Peru, the largest jungle city in the world unconnected by road to the rest of the world. It was…
Dr O’Connell becomes Associate Editor for GBE
Dr O’Connell has been invited to the board of associate editors for Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE). GBE is an Oxford University Press journal owned by the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, and is in the top ten evolutionary biology journals internationally and has an impact factor of 4.2. “I feel honoured to have been…
Placental Mammals and the limits of phylogenetic inference
More support for Atlantogenata. This week an international collaborative effort has tackled a major challenge in phylogenetics – the interrelationships amongst placental mammals. The paper has just been published in Genome Biology and Evolution (please click here to see the paper). In work led by Dr James Tarver and Dr Davide Pisani (with contributions from…