VCOM Louisiana Research Day Program Book 2024

Program Moderator

Pawel Michalak, PhD Associate Dean for Biomedical Affairs & Research, Louisiana Campus VCOM

Pawel Michalak, PhD; serves as as the Associate Dean for Biomedical Affairs & Research for VCOM (VCOM)'s Louisiana campus. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and the University of Haifa in Israel. Michalak previously served as a professor at the VCOM-Virginia campus since 2017, with a focus on comparative genomics, bioinformatics, and One Health, operating as head of the Integrative Genome Analysis Lab (IGAL) at the Center for One Health Research. His team has employed an integrative approach with a variety of molecular, computational and modeling techniques, including NextGen sequencing of entire genomes, epigenomes, and transcriptomes to establish rigorous understanding of how complexity elaborates from genomes through gene regulatory networks, and how it evolves over generations in response to environmental stress and intragenomic challenges.

Michalak has worked at nine universities in four countries across three continents. He has published his research in one book, with a second currently in preparation. Additionally, Michalak has been credited as a contributor in multiple books, as well as approximately 70 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, including “Cell,” “Science,” “Nature,” “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA” and “Proceedings of the Royal Society.” His research has been cited nearly 2000 times and popularized by various public media outlets.

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