Background
I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Alexander Cope, a role model and good friend of mine. He is an INSPIRE Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Premal Shah at Rutgers University. Dr. Cope has numerous publications on the topics of genome and proteome evolution, while also contributing to various software packages for the analysis of omics-scale data. He is primarily interested in developing mechanistic models rooted in evolutionary theory to extract biological information from omics data. His current research spans a variety of topics, including the evolution and mechanisms of mRNA translation dynamics, the evolution of secreted proteins, and evolution in "extremophilic" bacteria. We discussed everything from high school/college life, to work life, and even musical interests. A full list of his publications can be found at https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=pcx3ka4AAAAJ&hl=en#.
Representative publications: K. Skalenko, L. Li, Y. Zhang, I.O. Vvedenskaya, J.T. Winkelman, A.L. Cope, D.M. Taylor, P. Shah, R.H. Ebright, J.B. Kinney, Y. Zhang, B.E. Nickels; Promoter-sequence determinants and structural basis of primer-dependent transcription initiation in Escherichia coli; PNAS, Volume 118, Issue 27, July 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106388118 S. Poudel, A.L. Cope (Co-first author), K. O'Dell, A.M. Guss, H. Seo, C.T. Trinh, R.L. Hettich; An integrated approach to characterize proteins of unknown function (PUFs) in Clostridium thermocellum DSM 1313 as potential genetic engineering targets, Biotechnology for Biofuels, Volume 14, Issue 116, May 2021. doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13068-021-01964-4 A.L. Cope, B.C. O'Meara, M.A. Gilchrist; Gene Expression of Functionally-Related Genes Coevolves Across Fungal Species: Detecting Coevolution of Gene Expression Using Phylogenetic Comparative Methods, BMC Genomics, Volume 21, Issue 370, 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-020-6761-3 A.L. Cope, R.L. Hettich, M.A. Gilchrist; Quantifying codon usage in signal peptides: Gene expression and amino acid usage explain apparent selection for inefficient codons, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta – Biomembranes, Volume 1860, Issue 12, December 2018, Pages 2479 – 2485, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbamem.2018.09.010 C. Landerer, A. Cope, R. Zaretzki, M.A. Gilchrist; AnaCoDa: analyzing codon data with Bayesian mixture models, Bioinformatics, Volume 34, Issue 14, 15 July 2018, Pages 2496–2498, doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bty138