Stephan C Schuster

Biography

 Dr .Schuster has over 15 years of experience setting up and operating centralized sequencing core labs at Max Plank Institute in Germany and Penn State in the US. He won the Science magazine's break through of the year award in 2006 (runner up) and 2008 (Top 10), was awarded the Time Magazine's top ten Scientific discoveries in 2008 and with W. Miller was among Time magazine's top 100 most influential people of 2009. He is currently Research Director and Professor at the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Research in the Schuster Lab aims to map the genetic diversity of organisms at the genomic level and understanding the role and impact of such diversity in the environment. Using a combination of next-generation sequencing and ancient DNA techniques, the labis studying the natural history of a wide range of biological systems over extended periods of time. Because many of the species they investigate have generation times similar to our own, the study of specimens (historic or fossilized) dating back hundreds to tens of thousands of years enables us to develop relevant population genetics insights. These studies aim to better understand documented extinction events and perform comparative analysis of today’s remaining populations of endangered species. The studies in the laboratory involve organisms that include microbial organisms, plants, animals and humans. As many of the projects in the lab involve mixtures of DNA by virtue of samples tested, they have developed advanced experimental and bioinformatics approaches for assessing the species distribution within any given sample. These techniques have enabled metagenomic studies of both environmental and collection specimens at a high throughput level.

Research Interest

 Genome