Personal Statement
For more than three decades I have led an internationally competitive research programme, both as an academic and lab PI. Along the way, I spent a year as visiting professor in Harvard. In 2015, I moved from Ireland to the University of Manchester as part of Manchester’s International “Diamond Professorship” recruitment drive, and a year later I became “Domain Lead” in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine, and Health. In 2018, I moved to the University of Nottingham as head of one of the largest and most diverse schools of life sciences in the UK. Six years later, I left Nottingham to become the Head of the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour at the University of Liverpool.

LEADERSHIP ROLES AND ACHIEVEMENTS.
Almost 20 years ago I was one of the original proposers that Ireland would set up a Centre for High-End Computing. Together with collaborators from seven universities, we were successful and almost two decades later ICHEC still serves the needs of research and business in Ireland, North and South.

At the University of Manchester, I was tasked with structuring a new cross-faculty research effort, drawing its membership from the three constituent schools of the faculty.

While serving as the Head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham, I oversaw all aspects of the school's operations, including line-management, financial, estates and infrastructure, health and safety, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), as well as holding educational and research programme leadership responsibilities.

My tenure as the Head of School came to an end on February 1st of 2022, and I chose not to renew the position and instead I took a year’s sabbatical to work on my book. Subsequently, I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship entitled “Machine Learning Approaches to Understanding Pangenomes”.

For all of 2022, I held the position of President of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, which is a position elected by the society's 5,000 members. In 2016, I became an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. I was also elected Fellow of the Linnean Society.

Along with my university role as Head of Department, I serve on the Senate of the University of Liverpool, I am the chair of the Life Sciences Jury of the Blavatnik Awards in the United Kingdom, and I am also Deputy Chair of BBSRC Committee C.

Research Overview
My PhD was part of an EU-wide programme designed to understand marine processes, particularly in relation to the cycling of carbon, a topic of even more relevance now. On completion of my PhD, I worked on a “Natural Products Drug Discovery” project to understanding the diversity of Lithistid sponges, in particular those sponges thought to be closely related to Discodermia dissoluta, which produces the potent inhibitor of tumour cell growth, Discodermolide. This was funded in the UK by BBSRC and carried out at the Natural History Museum, London.

I started my bioinformatics research group in 1999 with a view to working on the evolution of prokaryotic genomes. I developed multivariate analysis software and found that bacteria can have two significantly different codon usage patterns on their lagging- and leading-strands of replication (1). My group has played a significant role in understanding the origin of Eukaryotes (2-6). We have developed several programs for phylogenetic model selection and computing phylogenetic trees in a distributed computing environment (7-9). We have shown lateral gene flows into Halophiles (10), the origins of major clades of archaea were facilitated by introgression from bacteria (11), we have developed a method of identifying reassortment in influenza (12) and we have shown gene replacement in fatty acid metabolism in Mycobacterium tuberculosis (13). We have collaborated on major international population genomic efforts, such as the worldwide study of polar bear population genomics (14). Most recently we have focussed on prokaryotic pangenomes (15-17). I have been part of more than €40 Million in programme grants, as well as several project grants and studentships directly awarded to the lab over the last two decades.

PAPERS CITED
1. McInerney, J. O. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA ([https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.95.18.10698] 95, 10698-10703 (1998).
2. McInerney et al., Nat Rev. Microbiol. 12, 449-455 (2014).
3. Cotton & McInerney Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107, 17252-17255 (2010).
4. Alvarez-Ponce & McInerney Genome Biol Evol 3, 782-790 (2011).
5. Alvarez-Ponce, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110 (2013).
6. Ku et al. Nature 524, 427-432 (2015).
7. Keane et al BMC Evol Biol 6, 29, doi:1471-2148-6-29 (2006).
8. Keane et al Nucleic Acids Res 35, W33-37 (2007).
9. Keane et al Bioinformatics 21, 969-974 (2005).
10. Nelson-Sathi, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109, 20537-20542 (2012).
11. Nelson-Sathi et al. Nature 517(7532):77-80 (2014).
12. Svinti, et al BMC Evol Biol 13, 1 (2013).
13. Kinsella, & McInerney. Trends Genet 19, 687-689 (2003).
14. Liu et al Cell 157(4)785-794 (2014).
15. McInerney, et al Nat Microbiol 2, 17040 (2017).
16. Domingo-Sananes & McInerney Trends in Micro 29 (6), 493-503 (2021)
17. Beavan, et al Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 121 (1), e2304934120 (2024)