The Scientific Director of the National Library of Medicine is responsible for the overall direction and quality of research conducted by the Intramural Research Program (IRP). NLM’s intramural research program supports the mission of the Library “...to assist with the advancement of medical and related sciences and to aid in the dissemination and exchange of scientific and other information important to the progress of medicine and to the public health.” It complements other NLM programs and initiatives that collect, organize, and provide access to the biomedical literature; contribute to the growth of molecular biology and clinical research data; and support research, development,and postdoctoral research training in biomedical informatics and data science.
Dr. Scheuermann brings vast expertise in informatics, data science, and computational methods coupled with experience in immunology and infectious diseases to NLM. As Scientific Director, he is responsible for setting scientific priorities and developing a comprehensive vision for NLM’s broad Intramural Research Program, which includes components housed in both the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications and the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Dr. Scheuermann guides NLM’s ongoing efforts to align NLM research priorities with the NLM Strategic Plan, the research priorities of NIH, and the broader biomedical research community.
Prior to joining NLM, Dr. Scheuerman was the La Jolla campus director at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). In addition, Dr. Scheuermann also served as the Director of Informatics at JCVI, an adjunct professor of pathology at the University of California, San Diego, and in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.
During his career, Dr. Scheuermann has applied his deep knowledge in molecular immunology and infectious disease toward the development of novel computational data mining methods and knowledge representation approaches, including the development of biomedical ontologies and their use in data mining, novel methods for the analysis of gene expression, protein network and flow cytometry data, and novel comparative genomics methods. These computational methods have been made available through several public database and analysis resources, including the Influenza Research Database (IRD), the Virus Pathogen Resource (ViPR), the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC), and the Immunology Database and Analysis Portal (ImmPort) supported by the NIH. More recently, Dr. Scheuermann has focused on the development of novel artificial intelligence approaches for interpreting single cell genomics data of the human immune and nervous systems.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Life Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.