Professor Lopez’s research at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) pivots on the action of genes/genomes, microbes and evolution. For over 20 years, his lab has applied genomics tools to address various specific questions in marine invertebrate-microbial symbiosis, microbial ecology, forensics, metagenomics, gene expression of oil-exposed organisms, and systematics/phylogenetics. Dr. Lopez is part of the DEEPEND Consortium (http://www.deependconsortium.org) to better understand food webs and microbial distributions in the deep Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. His laboratory was one of the founding members for the Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance or GIGA (http://GIGA-cos.org), which he continues to help coordinate and that applies genome sequencing and bioinformatics training to diverse non-model invertebrate species. GIGA is also part of the wider Earth Biogenome Project (https://www.earthbiogenome.org/). His research has also delved into characterizing the symbiotic microbial communities (“microbiomes”) of sponges, sharks, humans and bats, and recently completed a National Institutes of Justice project to apply microbiome signatures to human forensics.  The Lopez laboratory has recently extended this study to other related research under the topic of “water quality” and microbiome profiling of coastal Florida habitats, such as harmful algal blooms.  He was recently recognized as NSU’s President’s Distinguished Professor, and Halmos College Of Natural Sciences and Oceanography Professor of the Year (2018-2019). For more details, please see

URL: https://cnso.nova.edu/overview/faculty-staff-profiles/jose_lopez.html

https://works.bepress.com/jose-lopez/