Professor Jill Banfield
University of California Berkeley, USA and Monash University, Australia
Jill Banfield is a Professor at UC Berkeley and Monash University. She is a pioneer of genome-resolved metagenomics and has used these methods, along with metaproteomics, metatranscriptomics, mineralogy and geochemistry to investigate biogeochemistry, metabolism, microbial diversity, microbial community structure, ecology and evolution. For this work, she was the recipient of the Van Leeuwenhoek Medal, which is awarded for contributions to microbiology only once every ~ 10 years. She has a long-standing interest in extrachromosomal elements, including phages/viruses and plasmids and is currently using long read sequencing, protein family analysis and in silico structural biology to study enigmatic hypothetical proteins from Borg extrachromosomal elements that replicate in methane-oxidizing archaea.