Professor Vaughn Cooper

Vaughn Cooper is an evolutionary microbiologist and Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He is broadly interested in how potential pathogens (e.g. bacteria such as Burkholderia, Pseudomonas, Acinetobacter, and viruses like SARS-CoV-2) evolve to adapt to new hosts and environments. Other major interests include evolution in biofilms, the evolution of antimicrobial resistance and why genome regions mutate and evolve at different rates.

He is proud to have founded EvolvingSTEM, a program that provides an authentic classroom research experience for high school students across several states in which they conduct a microbiology experiment that demonstrates evolution in action. He also directs and co-founded the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at Pitt. He is also co-Founder and Scientific Advisor of SeqCoast Genomics and Middle Author Bioinformatics, which work together to provide advanced genome-scale sequencing and analyses using intuitive and accessible processes. Previously, he co-founded the Microbial Genome Sequencing Center (MiGS) and was a professor at the University of New Hampshire. He has an AB in Biology with honors from Amherst College, a PhD in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Behavior from Michigan State University, and was a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan in evolutionary biology and pediatrics. Dr. Cooper is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and his research on microbial and genomic evolution has appeared in >100 publications. He believes that there has never been a better time to be a microbiologist or geneticist thanks to unprecedented advances in technology, and he is committed to democratizing access to these exciting tools.