Michael A. Gilchrist
Michael A. Gilchrist is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
As a mathematical evolutionary biologist, Dr. Gilchrist's research covers topics ranging from intra-cellular processes to life-history evolution. This work is motivated by an interest in understanding the origin and resolution of trade-offs that organisms face in various aspects of their life cycles. Dr. Gilchrist typically employs a nested framework of mathematical models in approaching these issues.
To explore the relationship between virulence and transmission under different realistic biological scenarios, Dr. Gilchrist employed nested within-host models of viral dynamics inside a between-host model of disease dynamics. To better understand and interpret codon usage bias (e.g. the preference for the CAC codon for histidine over the CAT codon) and improve our ability to predict protein production rates from codon usage bias patterns (as seen with genes that are highly expressed), Dr. Gilchrist nested an intra-cellular model of ribosome movement within a population genetics model of gene fixation.
Dr. Gilchrist's research efforts in bioinformatics include developing statistical models to address questions related to protein function and expression (using genome scale datasets), parasite replication, the evolution of virulence, and host immune system activation. Dr. Gilchrist is also involved in the development of mathematical models for improving our ability to interpret high-throughput molecular datasets. To better interpret protein complex composition using high-throughput immuno-coprecipitation datasets, he developed a model of the purification step of the experimental process. More recently, he has worked with Dr. Russell Zaretzki at UTK to demonstrate the inherent bias in the SAGE dataset composition and to identify ways to adjust for this bias.
email: mikeg@utk.edu
phone: 865-974-6453
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