Saoirse Foley, Ph.D.

Biography

Having completed my B.Sc. in Genetics and Cell Biology at Dublin City University, I pursued my Ph.D. in tarantula phylogenomics at the National University of Singapore. During my postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University, I worked at Echinobase and learned how model organism databases operate. I am also a working group member at the Alliance of Genome Resources. My teaching background has focused on bioinformatics, genetics, and evolution.

Research Interests

• Arachnid evolution, e.g. tarantula colors and their widespread distributions
• Gene orthology, e.g. mysterious echinoderm genes  
• Bioinformatic methods 
• Model Organism Databases (MODs): working to establish Arachnobase

Selected Publications

A full list is available on my Google Scholar profile.

• Arshinoff, B.I., Cary, G.A., Karimi, K., Foley, S., Agalakov, S., Delgado, F., Lotay, V.S., Ku, C.J., Pells, T.J., Beatman, T.R., Kim, E., Cameron, R.A., Vize, P.D., Telmer, C.A., Croce, J., Ettensohn, C.A., Hinman, V.F. (2022). Echinobase: leveraging an extant model organism database to build a knowledgebase supporting research on the genomics and biology of echinoderms. Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 50, Issue D1, 2022. 
• Foley, S., Saranathan, V., & Piel, W. H. (2020). The evolution of colouration and opsins in tarantulas. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 287(1935), 20201688.
• Foley, S., Lüddecke, T., Cheng, D.-Q., Krehenwinkel, H., Künzel, S., Longhorn, S. J., Wendt, I., von Wirth, V., Tänzler, R., Vences, M., & Piel, W. H. (2019). Tarantula phylogenomics: A robust phylogeny of deep theraphosid clades inferred from transcriptome data sheds light on the prickly issue of urticating setae evolution. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 140, 106573.