Stephen Harris

Stephen Harris, who joined the biology faculty in January 2018, received a BS in molecular genetics from Ohio State University in 2006, an MA in science education from the City College of New York, and a PhD in evolutionary biology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 2015. His research uses genomics and bioinformatics to study the evolution, ecology, and behavior of natural populations in response to environmental change. 

His PhD research focused on urban ecology and investigated the population genomics of urban white-footed mice in New York City. Following his graduate studies, he completed one postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University in the Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology Department, studying local extinction in eusocial snapping shrimp across the Caribbean. He moved on to a postdoctoral researcher position at Metabiota and a visiting scholar appointment at Stanford University, where he used metagenomics to identify and track novel viruses from bats and rodents in Africa and Asia.

He has performed field work in urban ecosystems in New York City, coral reefs in the Florida Keys and Belize, and tropical forests in Indonesia, which has led to a passion for democratizing science by using the latest innovations in biotechnology to build portable, low-cost, and user-friendly sequencing labs for research and education.  In pursuing this mission, he recently co-founded and is Director of Science-Corps,  which sends recent PhD graduates abroad to teach science and build science capacity globally.