Yan Boucher

Assistant Professor

Phone:	780-248-1180
Fax:	(780) 492-9234
Email:	yboucher@ualberta.ca
Office:	G511A Biological Sciences
Office Hours:	By appointment
Address:	University of Alberta G511A Biological Sciences Edmonton, AB Canada T6G 2E9

Academic Training
BSc (Biochemistry): Université Laval, Québec, Canada
PhD (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology): Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
PDF: Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
PDF: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Integrated Microbial Diversity Program

Lab Web Page

Current Research Interest

The World of Microbial Evolution

When thinking about biological evolution, we usually imagine thousands of years over which animals and plant species change.  With microbes however, significant changes can happen in the matter of days or a few moments.  In the marine environment for example, as much as a thousand different variants of a single microbial species can be found in a milliliter of seawater, with hundreds or thousands of species present.
We ask two main questions: How does this diversity arise ? What role does it play in nature ? To answer such broad questions, we study the evolutionary processes in the Vibrios, a group of bacteria ubiquitous
in aquatic environments, responsible for  diseases as diverse as bleaching in corals and cholera in humans. We use techniques from the fields of population genetics, molecular epidemiology as well as experimental evolution.