Catherine Farrell, PhD
Catherine leads NCBI’s RefSeq Functional Elements (RefSeqFE) project, which catalogs and provides genome annotation for human and mouse functional regions beyond genes. She joined NCBI in 2006, worked as a RefSeq gene/transcript curator for over a decade before initiating the RefSeqFE project, and was a previous coordinator for the Consensus Coding Sequence (CCDS) project. Prior to joining NCBI, she served as an NIH researcher in the chromatin and gene regulation field.
Timothy Hefferon, PhD
Tim is a Staff Scientist in the NCBI Human Genetic Variation group. He oversees structural variation as the primary curator for dbVar and contributes to dbSNP and ALFA with a focus on somatic variation.
Tamara Goldfarb, PhD
Tamara is a curator with the RefSeq group at NCBI. In this role, she analyzes multiple types of sequence data, epigenetic data, and orthologous sequence data to provide accurate and complete reference sequence standards of coding and non-coding loci for all vertebrates. Before joining NCBI, Tamara studied mitotic and meiotic recombination and bacterial defense systems.
Megan S. Kane, PhD
Megan earned her PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Johns Hopkins McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine with a thesis on LMNA-related premature aging disorders. She completed postdoctoral training with the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program and the Inova Translational Medicine Institute. During her continued tenure at Inova, Megan collaborated with clinicians and researchers at Inova who developed and deployed pharmacogenetic clinical testing within the healthcare system. Megan joined the Medical Genetics and Variation team at NCBI in 2020 and is the lead author for the Medical Genetics Summaries and disease concept curator for the MedGen and GTR databases.
Melissa Landrum, PhD
Melissa is the Team Lead for the ClinVar database at NCBI. Prior to leading the ClinVar team, she was a curator on the NCBI RefSeq team for 12 years. She came to NCBI from The Johns Hopkins University, where she received her PhD in human genetics.
Adriana Malheiro, MS, CGC
Adriana is the Director of the NIH Genetic Testing Registry (GTR) which is an international database of orderable clinical and research genetic tests and the laboratories that provide them; and MedGen, NCBI’s portal to medical genetics information. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Medical Genetics Summaries, an online resource that provides structured pharmacogenomic evidence and practical information about genetic testing to guide drug therapy. Adriana is a certified genetic counselor with a mission to help successfully integrate genetic and genomic information into the practice of medicine.
Lon Phan, PhD
Lon is the Team Lead for Human Genetic Variation at NCBI, where he oversees efforts to support large-scale studies of human genetic variation including single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), insertions and deletions (indels), and other structural variants. He is responsible for resources including the variation databases dbSNP, dbVar, and ALFA and the Variation Services.
Shashikant Pujar, PhD
Shashi leads the RefSeq eukaryotic curation group at NCBI. His team provides manual annotation support to key genomes annotated by the RefSeq Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (EGAP). The curation team also provides high-value annotation products as a part of collaborative projects such as Consensus Coding Sequence (CCDS) and Matched Annotation from NCBI and EMBL-EBI (MANE). His team works closely with Model Organism Databases (MODs) and gene nomenclature groups to harmonize data between NCBI and external datasets used by a wide spectrum of genome communities. Before joining NCBI, he was involved in research in canine disease genomics at Cornell University.
Valerie Schneider, PhD
Valerie is the Deputy Director of Sequence Offerings and the head of the Sequence Plus program. In these roles, she coordinates efforts associated with the curation, enhancement, and organization of sequence data, as well as oversees tools and resources that enable the public to access, analyze, and visualize biomedical data. She also manages NCBI’s involvement in the Genome Reference Consortium, which is the international collaboration tasked with maintaining the value of the human reference genome assembly.
Sally Chang, PhD
Sally is an NCBI Education Team Lead within the Outreach Program and specializes in creating workshops and supporting other outreach events for people performing eukaryotic genome analysis. Her doctoral and post-doctoral work involved exploring cnidarian genome and transcriptome sequences as useful animal models to understand key biological processes such as tissue regeneration.
Kurtis Haro, PhD
Kurtis is a radiobiologist by training, but he currently serves as the Technical Lead for Business Intelligence (web analytics) at NCBI. His work is focused on delivering a better science and engineering research enterprise for the brilliant scientists and engineers tackling prescient problems in medicine and healthcare. He and his team analyze usage of the website to identify pain points, whether new application features were successful, and how users collect data both within a product and collectively across the site, among other areas of concern.
Rana Morris, PhD
Rana is an NCBI Customer Experience team member and currently the Outreach Program Lead. Since 2002, she has provided user support and training, as well as working with supervisors and development teams to improve NCBI resources based on user-centered design principles. Her doctoral, post-doctoral and research fellowship work integrated disciplines of computational and experimental biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology and genetics, and has included diagnostic development, drug design and coordination of genetics/genomics components of clinical trials.
Alexa Salsbury, PhD
Kurtis is a radiobiologist by training, but he currently serves as the Technical Lead for Business Intelligence (web analytics) at NCBI. His work is focused on delivering a better science and engineering research enterprise for the brilliant scientists and engineers tackling prescient problems in medicine and healthcare. He and his team analyze usage of the website to identify pain points, whether new application features were successful, and how users collect data both within a product and collectively across the site, among other areas of concern.
Tao Tao, PhD
Tao is a molecular biologist by training. He is a long-term member of the NCBI Customer Experience team, and provides user support in the area of dbGaP Authorized Access, Human variation resources, BLAST sequence analysis tools, as well as API access to NCBI databases. He worked in the fields of bacterial ion transport and viral vaccine development before joining NCBI in 2000.
Wes Ulm, PhD
Wes is an NCBI resource specialist and analyst originally trained in clinical medicine, genetics, and gene therapy at Harvard Medical School and MIT; funded by an NIH Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) fellowship, he completed a thesis focusing on the selective viral capsid-based cellular restriction of retroviral gene therapy vectors to enhance therapeutic delivery to diseased cells and tissues. He was selected as the author of the gene therapy reference in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Genetics, and later specialized in bioinformatics-guided protein and gene therapeutics and drug repurposing for muscular dystrophy and COVID-19 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital and UCLA. Outside his biomedical career, he is a champion on the Jeopardy TV quiz program and an accomplished popular musician and novelist.
Last Reviewed: June 28, 2023