Affiliation: University of Arkansas

Dr. Jeffrey A. Lewis joined the faculty at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Arkansas in 2013. He previously completed his PhD in Microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007, where his research under the mentorship of Dr. Jorge Escalante-Semerena focused on the genetics and biochemistry of bacterial metabolism. He then worked on the functional and comparative genomics of stress responses as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Audrey Gasch. His current research program focuses on understanding how cells sense and respond to stressful environments; in particular, why some individuals are more or less susceptible to stress. His lab takes advantage of brewer’s yeast, which arguably has the most sophisticated genetic toolbox, to understand which genes and processes are required for resistance to stressors commonly encountered in nature. Because life has dealt with environmental stress since the very beginning, stress responses are ancient, and thus yeast is an ideal model for generating an integrated view of eukaryotic stress defense and physiology.