Phillip Watts

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ORCID link: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7755-187X

ResearchGate address: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Phillip-Watts-4

General description

I was awarded his PhD in Population Genetics from the University of Liverpool, UK in 1997, after which I completed research positions at the Universities of Stirling and Liverpool, and the International Livestock Research Institute, Kenya, I was appointed as a lecturer (2005) and then senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool (2009), and later acquired a position at the University of Oulu, Finland, where I was awarded a Professorship (2017). I was appointed as Professor in Evolutionary Genetics at the Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Jyväskylä in 2019.

Active JYU affiliations

Department of Biological and Environmental Science, Professor

Previous, inactive or other affiliations

Department of Biological and Environmental Science (University of Jyväskylä), , Ended

Research interests

My research focusses on understanding how wildlife respond to environment change, which therefore involves a blend studies into genome-environment interactions, microbiota-wildlife interactions, and population- and conservation-genetics.

Me and my group employ diverse genetics and genomics methods and accompanying bioinformatics analyses. We mostly employ next generation sequencing (NGS) methods, for example, to quantify genomic (e.g. ddRAD, sequence pature, genome sequencing) and transcriptomic (e.g. RNAseq) variation in response to a spatially diverse landscape. In particular, we are interested in the fitness consequences of host-microbiota interactions, and thus use amplicon sequencing (at 16S, ITS and 18S regions) and metagenomics to quantify microbial community composition and function; we use targeted and untargeted metabolomics to determine products of microbiota communities.