Principal Investigator
     
 
Alex Mira
Principal Investigator
 
  Alex Mira, principal investigator. Alex is a senior scientist at the Center for Advanced Research in Publich Health (CSISP), where he leads the OralMicrobiome Laboratory. Alex studied Biology at the University of Alicante, where he got the Degree Excellence Award and specialised in Evolution at Oxford University as a British Council scholar, where he obtained an MSc degree. He then stayed at Oxford for the PhD as a Rhodes scholar, working on bacterial symbionts and evolution of mitochondria. Later on, he continued his research carrer at the University of Arizona, funded by the Fulbright Programe, doing research on bacterial symbionts and bacterial comparative genomics with Nancy Moran and Howard Ochman. He then moved to Sweden as a pos-doctoral researcher in Siv Andersson's lab, at Uppsala University, where he worked on bacterial genomics and microarray studies in intracellular parasites. Alex then returned to Spain as a "Ramon y Cajal" researcher, working in the Evolutionary Genomics Group at Miguel Hernandez University between 2003-2008. After this he got a permanent position at the CSISP. He writes:  
     
  "My main current interest is the study of the Human Microbiome (the bacteria inhabiting the human body), particularly the oral cavity. We do this by genomic, bioinformatic and metagenomic techniques and by more traditional microbiology approaches. We have described the first available oral metagenome and have isolated several strains that inhibit the growth of caries-causing bacteria. I am also interested in evolutionary and comparative genomics of bacteria and current and past work have focused on different projects in the area, specially the evolution of gene families, evolution of genome architecture, evolution of germ cells, experimental evolution of E coli mutants and evolution of IS elements. I am one of the founders of the Spanish Network for Bacterial Genomics, for which I am the coordinator. In 2006-2007 I was a member of the directive board of the National Association of Ramon y Cajal Scientists (ANIRC). Together with Joseba Bikandi, I am helping in the development of on-line genomics tools to study oligonucleotide frequencies and other DNA composition features at a genomic scale:  
  http://insilico.ehu.es/oligoweb".