Dr. John Gaynor received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in Plant Biology and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biology Department at Yale University and the Laboratory of Plant Molecular Biology at Rockefeller University.  With support from NSF, Dr. Gaynor has made important contributions to ethylene biology and it’s role in modulating gene expression in plants. He has published over 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals and was invited as a Visiting Scholar by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to work and lecture in the People’s Republic of China.  Dr. Gaynor has recently initiated research efforts into the field of nanotechnology and, through collaboration with Dr. Paul Bologna, in the molecular biology of Cnidarians with a special emphasis on venom proteins and venomics of Scyphozoans. As PI or co-Investigator on several university-, NSF-, and NJDEP-funded grants, Dr. Gaynor has been retrained as a molecular ecologist with extensive field experience.  The application of molecular tools in the field have revolutionized the discipline of ecology and conservation genetics.  Combined with the remarkable resolving power of NextGen DNA sequencing, the areas of genomics and metagenomics have truly rewritten the ways biologists think about - and study - the natural world. In addition, Dr. Gaynor employs bioinformatics to exploit the massive data sets that his laboratory have generated from metagenomic eDNA samples as well as whole genome sequencing of important jellyfish.