Karl Kjer
Karl M. Kjer (19 November, 1959, age 55) is an American entomologist, taxonomist, and molecular biologist. He is currently a professor at University of California, Davis.
Background
In 1992, Kjer received his Ph.D. in entomology at the University of Minnesota. During his post-doctorate at BYU, he studied homology on ribosomal RNA. He started teaching at Rutgers University in 1996.[1]
Research
Kjer studies Trichoptera phylogeny, and is contributor to the Trichoptera Barcode of Life Database. The database is part of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, a project which hopes to collect barcodes for all of life.[2] The database had 61,000 individuals in 5,800 species as of 2015, representing about half the genetic diversity of Trichoptera.[3][4] He showed that substitution rates are the most important factor in site-specific rate estimation, and that codon partitioning is a poor method of differential weighting.[5] Kjer, along with Bernhard Misof and Xin Zhou, lead the 1KITE initiative, which studies insect evolution through both phylogenomic sequencing and morphology.