About me
Currently
I am an Associate Professor in Bioinformatics at the Research Centre for Health & Life Sciences, Coventry University, UK, where I have been working on the evolution of healthy ageing in social organisms since September 2024.
I am fascinated by the multiple independent origins of eusociality across animals, e.g. ants, bees, wasps, termites, ambrosia beetles and even within mammals, the naked mole-rats. Despite such divergent origins, these transitions from solitary to colony living organisms have produced similar complex phenotypes, e.g. a division of reproductive labour and often extreme longevity among the reproductive individuals. But most intriguing for me is that extreme longevity and healthy ageing have evolved within each of these independent origins of eusociality.
The main goal of my research is to find the fundamental molecular signatures of eusociality, by comparatively analysing genomes and transcriptomes within and among all evolutionary origins. I am addressing this goal with a combination of comparative genomics, transcriptomics and machine learning techniques. My ultimate aim is to discover key genomic signatures of healthy ageing in eusocial animals that are applicable to ageing research in humans.
Previously...
I grew up in Derby, in the East Midlands, UK, where I did my GCSEs at Sinfin Community School and A-levels in Chemistry, German and Maths at Wilmorton College. At the age of 19, I moved to Wuppertal in Germany, to first improve my German and then study Economics and Business Management - Wirtschaftswissenschaften. With this degree I worked as a strategic media consultant for MediaCom in Düsseldorf for 7 years. At MediaCom I was in charge of consulting for several brands for a large international company, while supervising several junior consultants.
But then...
At the age of 33 while visiting the natural history museum in London, I had an epiphany - it was there I realised, I should be working in biology. I went back to university and began my academic career in biology, first a BSc in Düsseldorf (2007-2010), followed by an MSc in Bochum (2010-2012). I then returned to the Midlands to pursue a PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Leicester with Rob Hammond and Eamonn Mallon, investigating the effects of ploidy on selection. It is during this period that I developed my love and fascination for evolutionary biology, while developing important bioinformatics skills, such as R and Perl (later Python), as well as analytical experience in molecular evolution, population genomics and transcriptomics. After my PhD, I worked as a postdoc for 9 years within the group of Erich Bornberg-Bauer at the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, University of Münster, where I developed my fascination for the genomics of convergent evolutionary origins of eusociality and healthy ageing.
University of Münster
Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity
Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group
https://bornberglab.org/people/harrison/
