Karl Kjer
Karl M. Kjer (19 November, 1959, age 56) is an American entomologist, taxonomist, and molecular biologist.
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.