Vaughn Cooper Australian Microbial Ecology Conference 2024

Vaughn Cooper

Vaughn Cooper, Ph.D. is an evolutionary biologist and microbiologist. He is currently Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and Computational and Systems Biology, at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine. He co-founded and is Director of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM), which works to catalyze research and education at the interface of these disciplines. He’s also a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and an elected Board member of the American Society of Microbiology. The Cooper laboratory studies how potential pathogens (e.g. bacteria such as Burkholderia, Pseudomonas, Acinetobacter, and viruses like SARS-CoV-2) evolve to adapt to new hosts and environments. Other major interests include evolution in biofilms, the evolution of antimicrobial resistance and why genome regions mutate and evolve at different rates. We are proud to have founded EvolvingSTEM (http://evolvingstem.org), a program that provides an authentic classroom research experience for high school students across several states in which they conduct a microbiology experiment that demonstrates evolution in action.