James O. McInerney is an Irish-born microbiologist, computational evolutionary biologist, professor, and former head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham. He is an elected Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology and elected Fellow of the Linnean Society. In June 2020 he was elected president-designate of the

Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) is a scientific and academic organization founded in 1982 to support academic research in the field of molecular evolution. The society hosts an annual meeting, typically in June or July. It al ...

and in 2022 he took up the role of President.

Early life and education

McInerney completed his bachelor's degree at NUI Galway. In 1994, he was awarded a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

(also from NUI Galway). In 2013, he was awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from the National University of Ireland.

Career and research

After completing his PhD, McInerney worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Diagnostics Centre in Galway and in the Department of Zoology at The Natural History Museum, London. In 1999, McInerney returned to Ireland to set up the Bioinformatics Research Group at NUI Maynooth and became the Director of the Genetics and Bioinformatics degree course. In 2012-2013, he took a sabbatical at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University. In 2015, the McInerney research group moved to The University of Manchester where McInerney took up a Chair in Evolutionary Biology. In 2016, McInerney was appointed as the Director of the Research Domain of
Evolution, Systems and Genomics
in th
Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
at the University of Manchester. In 2018, McInerney moved from Manchester to the University of Nottingham, to take up the Chair in Evolutionary Biology and the position of Head of the School of Life Sciences. In August 2024, McInerney moved to

The University of Liverpool , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

to take up the position of Head of the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour. McInerney's early research career focused on the study of codon usage in a variety of organisms including '' Trichomonas vaginalis'' and '' Borrelia burgdorferi''. McInerney was the first to show that the leading strands of replication and the lagging strands of replication in a prokaryotic genome could have significantly different codon usage patterns, due to the way in which polymerases replicate DNA. One of his first software packages, GCUA, allowed for the accessible and reproducible analysis of codon usage by other biologists. Since then, the McInerney research group has published several bioinformatic software programs including Clann: Software for inferring phylogenetic

supertree A supertree is a single phylogenetic tree assembled from a combination of smaller phylogenetic trees, which may have been assembled using different datasets (e.g. morphological and molecular) or a different selection of taxa. Supertree algorithms ...

s, Crann: Software for inferring selection, Modelgenerator: Amino acid and nucleotide substitution model selection, PutGaps: DNA gapped file from amino acid alignment, and TIGER: Identifying rapidly-evolving characters in evolutionary data. Currently, the McInerney lab focusses on understanding the origins of eukaryotes, and on understanding horizontal gene transfer, and prokaryotic pangenomes and the assemblage of genes within them McInerney has been funded by the

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds scientific rese ...

(BBSRC), The Templeton Foundation, The European Molecular Biology Organisation, and Science Foundation Ireland.

Awards and honours

* Appointed as Senior Editor for Evolution and Responses to Interventions for the journal

Microbial Genomics A microorganism, or microbe,, ''mikros'', "small") and ''organism'' from the el, ὀργανισμός, ''organismós'', "organism"). It is usually written as a single word but is sometimes hyphenated (''micro-organism''), especially in olde ...

. * Elected President of the

(President-elect for 2021, President in 2022, Past-President for 2023). * Elected Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (2016). * Elected Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology (2015). * Recognised by the Irish government with a conference ambassador award by the Minister for Tourism (2015). * Elected secretary of the

(2013-2017). * Associate Editor for Molecular Biology and Evolution (2009-2018)

Public outreach

* Synopsis of Nature Micro (2017) paper "Why Prokaryotes Have Pangenomes" * Speaking on Virgin Births ( parthenogenesis) for FBMH's science-themed advent calendar * Synopsis of Nature (2015) paper "Endosymbiotic origin and differential loss of eukaryotic genes" * Radio interview for RTE's "Bright Sparks" radio series * Synopsis of polar bear paper Cell (2014) paper "Population Genomics Reveal Recent Speciation and Rapid Evolutionary Adaptation in Polar Bears"

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McInerney, James O. Irish microbiologists 1969 births Living people Fellows of the Linnean Society of London Alumni of the University of Galway Irish expatriates in the United Kingdom Academics of the University of Manchester Academics of the University of Nottingham Evolutionary biologists Computational biologists Scientists from County Clare