Arsh Bashirullah
Arash Bashirullah will step down as Senior Advisory Editor at Genetics.
Arash was appointed dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Houston in January 2026. Editor-in-Chief Howard Lipshitz and the Editorial Board sincerely thank Arash for providing wise counsel and insight to the EIC, senior editors and senior staff over the past three and a half years, and wish him continued success.
Lynn Cooley
Special Consulting Editor
Lynn Cooley attended Connecticut College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in zoology. She went to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin but found her way to Dieter Sohl’s lab at Yale University to conduct her dissertation research on tRNA transcription and processing. He received his PhD in chemistry from UT Austin for his research at Yale. Cooley did postdoctoral training at the Carnegie Institution of Science Department of Embryology in Baltimore, MD. As a postdoc, he developed the first large-scale mutagenesis screen. Drosophila Using single P transposable elements as mutagens greatly accelerated the cloning of affected genes. He began his own research program at Yale University School of Medicine in 1989 with the molecular analysis of two mutations that slow egg growth during oogenesis that cause female infertility. This led to important new insights into the regulation of the actin cytoskeleton in vivo. Currently, Cooley’s research focuses on the formation and function of intercellular bridges called ring canals that connect germline cells as they form gametes. Similar ring canals are present in germ cells throughout the animal kingdom, and Drosophila The system provides an excellent model for investigating color channels and their biogenesis. She is also investigating a surprising discovery in her lab. Drosophila mRNA stop codons undergo readthrough resulting in the production of an unexpectedly long protein. Stop codon readthrough is particularly efficient in neurons of the central nervous system, suggesting that longer proteins serve new functions in the brain.
Cooley served as director of Yale’s Joint Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) before being appointed dean of the Yale Graduate School in 2014 and vice provost for postdoctoral affairs in 2021. He most recently served as vice president and then president of GSA. She is a Pew Scholar Award recipient, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.
Sushma Nithani
Associate Editor
Computational resources, software, and databases
Sushma Nithani is an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. He holds an MS in Biotechnology and a PhD in Botany. During his postdocs at Iowa State University and Cornell University, he studied organelle biogenesis in unicellular cyanobacteria (Synechocystis) and focused on yeast and later self-incompatibility mechanisms. Brassica. His current research focuses on plant genome and transcriptome analysis, biocuration, and the development of open-source plant genomic and pathway resources. She is the Lead Biocurator and Principal Investigator of the Plant Reactome Knowledge Base. Additionally, Nithani plays an important role in developing the FAIR Genomic Data Policy. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the AgBioData Consortium and previously served as an elected Executive Committee member of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB). Served as Editor-in-Chief of Current Plant Biology (2017-2023), Associate Editor for Frontiers in Plant Scienceand guest editor for Current Opinion in Plant Biology. She is the recipient of the 2025 AgBioData Mission and Leadership Award, ISB’s Excellence in Biocuration 2024 Award, and the Sustainable Research Parasitism (aka The Merozoite) 2024 Award presented by the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, GigaScience, and Gigabyte.
