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Episode 1: The Difficulties of Big Data in the Biological Sciences

Featuring Jonathan Jacobs, Senior Director, Bioinformatics and Principal Scientist

 

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Guest:

Jonathan Jacobs, headshot.

Jonathan Jacobs, PhD

Senior Director of Bioinformatics, ATCC

Dr. Jonathan Jacobs leads ATCC’s Sequencing & Bioinformatics Center and the development of the ATCC Genome Portal. He has over 20 years of experience in molecular genetics, bioinformatics, and microbial genomics, and he has worked throughout his career at the interface of academia, government, and industry. He holds a joint Research Professor appointment at Syracuse University’s Forensic & National Security Sciences Institute in support of microbial forensics graduate student training and research, and he actively collaborates with several US public health laboratories involved in pathogen genomics research and surveillance. Dr. Jacobs is also certified in Product Management from Pragmatic Institute, and he has led successful commercial launches of several bioinformatics products into the market.

Show Notes:

A growing area of concern for genomics researchers is the lack of standards for genomic data, which leads to limited traceability and incomplete metadata. In this episode ATCC’s Jonathan Jacobs addresses some of the issues at hand such as reproducibility in research and the pros and cons of crowd sourcing data. He touches on a series of efforts at ATCC for improved genomics digitization, including biology and bioinformatics, lab notebook digitization, public coordination with other standards working groups, and ATCC’s genome portal that hosts an ever increasing amount of ATCC product sequencing information.

Host:

David Yarmosh, headshot.

David Yarmosh, MS

Lead Bioinformatician, ATCC

David Yarmosh is a lead bioinformatician in ATCC’s Sequencing and Bioinformatics Center. He’s a graduate of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. He has been working in large data aggregation and analysis since 2013 and microbial genomics with a focus on biosurveillance R&D efforts since 2016. David has led international training exercises in Peru and Senegal, sharing metagenomic analytical capabilities. His interests include genomics database construction, metadata collection, drug resistance mechanisms, bioinformatics standards, and machine learning. Since joining ATCC in 2020, David has worked extensively in SARS-CoV-2 classification, epidemiology, and genomics evaluation, including enhanced and uniform variant reporting. He has contributed more broadly to genomics reporting and analytical standardization and he has helped develop the podcast Behind the Biology, which he now hosts.

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