Naim Matasci

I am the Scientific Lead for the Tree of Life Grand Challenge at the iPlant Collaborative and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

The goal of the iPlant Tree of Life project is to produce a phylogenetic tree of all green plants and provide the scientific community with the tools to visualize and analyze trees of this magnitude. The challenges encountered range from designing new, more powerful computational methods to promote computational thinking among plant biologists.

My primary research focus is the evolution of protein expression, in particular the role of protein stability in evolution and the causes of allele specific expression. My background is in evolutionary genetics and for the last ten years I have developed and applied computational methods to address broad evolutionary questions.

I am also involved in various projects revolving around evolution, phylogenetics and biodiversity informatics.