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Pilar Francino Title Adjunct Assistant Professor School of Natural Sciences Email pfrancino@ucmerced.edu Website http://faculty1.ucmerced.edu/pfrancino Address University of California, Merced School of Natural Sciences 5200 North Lake Rd. Merced, CA 95343

Professor Francino's broad scientific goal is to apply an ecological and evolutionary perspective to the study of genomes, with a main focus on bacteria, using a computational and an experimental approach.

The computational projects investigate the forces that shape the structure, organization and evolution of bacterial genomes and address molecular evolution subjects at different scales, such as:

• The impact of mutational biases during DNA sequence evolution
• The evolution of new genes and their regulatory regions
• The coevolution of different genomic traits

Experimentally, we investigate the metagenomics of a complex bacterial niche, the human gastrointestinal tract, to understand the development, population genetics and coding capabilities of the bacterial community in this environment, as well as its impact on human health.

• Ph.D., 1999 — University of Rochester
• B.S, 1992 — National Autonomous University of Mexico