American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) Logo American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) Logo 0
  • Careers
  • Support

Episode 2: Pivoting into Bioinformatics and Capitalizing on Eureka Moments

Featuring Jonathan Jacobs, Senior Director, Bioinformatics and Principal Scientist

 

Listen on Apple Podcasts button Listen on YoutUbe Music button Listen on Spotify button Listen on Pandora button

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:

The path to success usually does not follow a straight line. In this episode, ATCC’s Jonathan Jacobs talks about his rise from academic into industry and then non-profit laboratories, commenting on some of the pivotal moments. He'll hone in on what was unique about his path to success and touch on what he's proud of and some of the doubts that he's felt along the way. Listen in to learn about some of the eureka moments that helped shape Dr. Jacob’s career.

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.

ATCC Genome Portal

Reference-quality Genomes

ATCC is not only enriching the characterization of our biological collections by using next-generation sequencing, we are also making those data available to everyone through the ATCC Genome Portal.

Learn more

ATCC Genome Portal

The ATCC Genome Portal makes it easy to find the high-quality whole-genome sequencing data needed for your research. You can easily search, download, and analyze thousands of reference-quality genomes for our microbial strains.

Go to the portal