Episode 27: MicroQuant^™- Modernizing Quality Control Testing

Dr. Nilay Chakraborty is the BioNexus Foundation Principal Scientist at ATCC. He is an expert in the area of biopreservation and currently focuses on strategic development of innovative products at ATCC. An engineer by training, Nilay received his MBA from Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology and PhD from University of North Carolina. He developed several innovative technologies on biopreservation and cell-based technologies during his tenure at the Center for Engineering in Medicine in Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Burns Hospital. Prior to joining ATCC, Nilay was a tenured Associate Professor at University of Michigan, Dearborn, and served as the Provost Fellow and Chair of the Research Committee for College of Engineering at University of Michigan. He has designed and developed several programs at the University of Michigan that focused on success of first-generation college students. Nilay served as a PI of several Federal Research Grants and served as a reviewer for Federal Scientific bodies including NSF and NIH. He has multiple patents and has actively worked in the area technology translation area by creating two successful startup businesses. At ATCC, Dr. Chakraborty is developing a core group centered around advancing ATCC’s core competencies in preservation sciences and strategic development of innovative biological products that leverages recent advances in preservation technology and bioengineering.

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.