Dr. Igor Babkin is a leading researcher in the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia. He was previously a scientist in the Department of the Molecular Biology of Poxviruses at the State Research Center Virology and Biotechnology “Vector”. His current research interests encompass sequencing of viral genomes, human virome, rodent virome, analysis of extremophilic bacterial communities, development of oncolytic poxviruses, study of the human gastroviruses, phylogenetic analysis, search recombination events, and estimation of divergence times and evolutionary rates.