CDR Gelio Alves, PhD

Gelio received his PhD in statistical physics from Florida Atlantic University, and he is currently serving as a commander with the United States Public Health Service. His work at NCBI focuses on the development of statistical methods and algorithms for the analysis of proteomics data and for the fast identification of pathogens via mass spectrometry.

• MiCId: A workflow with accurate statistical significance for rapid identification of microorganisms, and antibiotic resistance proteins, and estimation of biomass.

Peter Cooper, PhD

Peter is a Staff Scientist at the National Library of Medicine who helps the NCBI Outreach Program including NCBI's marketing, education, and conference exhibit activities. He is the chief editor of the NCBI Insights blog and is an instructor in the NCBI education program. He also provides user support for the NCBI molecular databases and the BLAST sequence similarity search services.

Daniel Half, PhD

Daniel joined NCBI in 2014 as an experienced researcher in protein family construction and curation, genome annotation pipeline development, and design of tools that use comparative genomics to help infer roles and functions for previously unknown protein. At NCBI, he works primarily as a RefSeq database biocurator, mining the scientific literature to build hidden Markov models (HMMs) that work as annotation rules and propagate information from publications to proteins. Those HMMs become part of PGAP, NCBI's Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (PGAP), and operate on thousands of genomes per day. Some of Dan's areas of major research interest include Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) proteins, protein-sorting systems, selenoproteins, CRISPR, novel cofactors, and natural products.

• Genome Mining for Novel Choice-of-Anchor Domains and Type X Secretion Sys. (txss) C-Terminal Sorting Signals

Michael Feldgarden, PhD

Michael received his PhD in Biology from Yale University where he examined the evolutionary ecology of colicin production in E. coli. He then was a post-doc at Wesleyan University where he worked on the evolutionary ecology of Bacillus subtilis. Following that, Dr. Feldgarden was a Research Professor at Stony Brook University, where his research focused on finding molecular signatures of pathoadaptive loci in bacterial genomes. He then was the Research Director at the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics at Tufts University, after which he joined the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT where he developed and led large scale microbial genomics projects, focusing on E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Dr. Feldgarden currently is a staff scientist at NCBI where, as part of the Pathogen Detection Project, he works on pathogen genomics and antimicrobial resistance informatics.

• NCBI’S MicroBIGG-E and Reference Gene Catalog Enable Analysis of the Phylogenetics and Distribution of KPC-Family β -lactamases
• Next Generation Sequencing for Clinical and Public Health Microbiology

Arjun Prasad, PhD

Arjun is a staff scientist on the NCBI Pathogen Detection team where he takes care for to the AMRFinderPlus software and database as well as the Pathogen Detection analysis pipeline. He oversees AMRFinderPlus and contributes to the management, design, development, quality control, testing, documentation, outreach, and training for NCBI Pathogen Detection tools and resources.

• The Relationship between Carbapenem Resistant Phenotype and Genotype Including Unknown Mechanisms Interrogated with NCBI Pathogen Detection
• Next Generation Sequencing for Clinical and Public Health Microbiology

Alexa Salsbury, PhD

Alexa is an NCBI Education Team Lead within the Outreach Program where she focuses on data science outreach and community engagement in areas like cloud computing, large-scale sequence search, machine learning, algorithmic bias, and more. She has extensive experience in computational education and a research background of computational chemistry, structural biology, and biophysics.

Shobha Sharma, PhD

For the last 15 years, Shobha has served as a Prokaryote Curator within the NCBI Taxonomy Group. Her primary focus is to ensure that high-quality prokaryote taxonomic data is easily accessible to researchers in the public domain. She also handles all requests for genome names submitted for Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI) checks and provides guidance to GenBank indexers. Her research background is in molecular microbiology.

• NCBI Taxonomy and Other NCBI Resources for Prokaryotic Curation

Françoise Thibaud-Nissen, PhD

Françoise leads the prokaryotic annotation operations team at NCBI, which aims at enhancing the value of eukaryotic genomes submitted to GenBank, ENA and DDBJ by decorating them with high quality gene annotation in a timely and consistent manner. She is also the head of the NCBI Prokaryotic annotation and curation resources team who is responsible for maintaining the RefSeq collection of archaeal and bacterial genomes with rich, up-to-date and consistent annotation. Her team also publishes expert-created statistical models for protein families and develops easy-to-use tools, including PGAP, so that research scientists, bioinformaticians and lay users can annotate and analyze their own genomes.

• The Refseq Collection And PGAP In The Age Of Metagenomes