Hilary Morrison Headshot
Contact Information
Education
Ph.D. Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Yale University 1987
A.B. Biology, Harvard University 1981
MBL Affiliations
Location
Research Area

Dr. Hilary Morrison is a molecular biologist with graduate and postgraduate training in virology and infectious disease epidemiology. She is a year-round resident scientist with research interests in parasite genomics, microbial ecology, microbiomes, and sequencing technology. 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. 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. She 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. Morrison collaborates on diverse microbiome projects including the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study, the gut and lung microbiomes of cystic fibrosis patients and the macroalgal microbiome across time and space.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hilary-Morrison-2

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=-cmjxwsAAAAJ

Hilary Morrison works with
Susan Brawley
Susan Brawley
Professor
University of Maine
no headshot
Juliette Madan
Associate Professor
Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine
maignien
Loïs Maignien
Associate Professor
Université de Bretagne Occidentale
A Murat Eren
A. Murat Eren
Assistant Professor
The Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago
Selected Publications

Capistrant-Fossa KA, Morrison HG, Engelen AH, Quigley CTC, Morozov A, Serrão EA, Brodie J, Gachon CMM, Badis Y, Johnson LE, Hoarau G, Abreu MH, Tester PA, Stearns LA, Brawley SH. The microbiome of the habitat-forming brown alga Fucus vesiculosus (Phaeophyceae) has similar cross-Atlantic structure that reflects past and present drivers. J Phycol. 2021 Jun 27. doi: 10.1111/jpy.13194. PMID: 34176151

Coker MO, Laue HE, Hoen AG, Hilliard M, Dade E, Li Z, Palys T, Morrison HG, Baker E, Karagas MR, Madan JC. Infant Feeding Alters the Longitudinal Impact of Birth Mode on the Development of the Gut Microbiota in the First Year of Life. Front Microbiol. 2021 Apr 7;12:642197. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2021.642197. eCollection 2021.PMID: 33897650

Lee STM, Kahn SA, Delmont TO, Shaiber A, Esen ÖC, Hubert NA, Morrison HG, Antonopoulos DA, Rubin DT, Eren AM. Tracking microbial colonization in fecal microbiota transplantation experiments via genome-resolved metagenomicsMicrobiome. 2017 May 4;5(1):50. doi: 10.1186/s40168-017-0270-x.PMID: 28473000

Eren AM, Morrison HG, Lescault PJ, Reveillaud J, Vineis JH, Sogin ML. Minimum entropy decomposition: unsupervised oligotyping for sensitive partitioning of high-throughput marker gene sequences. ISME J. 2015 Mar 17;9(4):968-79. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2014.195.PMID: 25325381

Newton RJ, McLellan SL, Dila DK, Vineis JH, Morrison HG, Eren AM, Sogin ML. Sewage reflects the microbiomes of human populations. mBio. 2015 Feb 24;6(2):e02574. doi: 10.1128/mBio.02574-14.PMID: 25714718