Hilary G. Morrison
Senior Research Scientist
e: morrison@mbl.edu
p: 508 289 7339
f: 508 457 4727
Morrison_CV

Dr. Hilary Morrison is a molecular biologist with graduate and postgraduate training in virology and infectious disease epidemiology. She is a Track II scientist with research interests in parasite genomics and microbial ecology. She led the project to sequence, assemble, and annotate the Giardia lamblia genome, published in Science in 2007. Giardia, as well as being a medically important human parasite, is an enigmatic microbe that exhibits an early divergence in the eukaryotic domain of life. Her current parasitologic research is the investigation of host and parasite gene expression during Geomyces destructans infection in the little brown bat. This infection, termed “white nose syndrome”, has led to the major population collapse and threatened extinction of Myotis lucifugus in the northeast. Morrison was part of an MBL team that developed pyrotag sequencing, a method for defining microbial population structures using high-throughput next generation instruments to sequence short regions of the ribosomal RNA gene. Morrison collaborates on several projects that utilize tag sequencing, including the Human Microbiome Project and an investigation of the leech microbiome in response to dietary changes. In the context of both these areas of research, Morrison has been instrumental in obtaining and developing protocols for new sequencing technologies and developing new software tools and pipelines. She was part of a multi-institutional team that developed a transposon-based next-generation library construction technique.

Personnel

Joe Vineis
Research Assistant III
e: jvineis@mbl.edu
p: 508 289 7179
f: 508 457 4727

Sharon Grim
Research Assistant III
e: sgrim@mbl.edu
p: 508 289 7721
f: 508 457 4727