Rate My Professor Justin Meyer

Justin Meyer is a professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Tata Chancellor’s Endowed Professorship in Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. He served as a Systems Biology Departmental Fellow at Harvard Medical School, where he was awarded the James S. McDonnell Foundation Fellowship for Studying Complex Systems. Meyer joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2014 in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution and the Quantitative Biology Initiative.

The Meyer Lab addresses fundamental questions in evolutionary theory, including speciation, novelty, evolvability, and complexity, through real-time experimental observations using microbial platforms and synthetic biology approaches. Research often centers on bacteriophage λ and its evolution to exploit alternative receptors, providing insights into host-pathogen interactions. The lab advances phage therapy by developing evolutionary training protocols to pre-evolve bacteriophages that counter bacterial resistance and collaborates on synthetic phage platforms, including gene drive technologies, to remove antibiotic resistance genes from microbiomes and restore antibiotic effectiveness. Key publications include Borin et al. (2023) on rapid bacteria-phage coevolution in Science; Borin et al. (2021) on coevolutionary phage training in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Petrie et al. (2018) on destabilizing mutations in Science; Meyer et al. (2016) on ecological speciation of bacteriophage lambda in Science; and Meyer et al. (2012) on repeatability and contingency in the evolution of a key innovation in lambda phage in Science. Meyer’s work contributes to microbial evolution, phage therapeutics, and evolutionary medicine.