Featuring Dr. Ryan Wick
Show Notes:
In this episode, Dr. Ryan Wick discusses the path that led him into bioinformatics and the technologies that have shaped his work in bacterial genomics. Dr. Wick shares how an early interest in biology evolved through careers in healthcare software and science education into a passion for programming and computational biology. He explains how that journey led to the development of a tool that helps scientists visualize genome assembly graphs, and later a hybrid assembler that combines short- and long-read sequencing data to create complete bacterial genome assemblies. Dr. Wick also explores how advances in next-generation sequencing, machine learning, and bioinformatics algorithms have improved the accuracy and accessibility of genome assembly.
Guest:
Ryan Wick, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Pathogen Genomics, University of Melbourne
Ryan Wick is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne's Center for Pathogen Genomics where he works on assembly algorithms for bacterial genomes. He has a particular interest in long-read assembly and hybrid assembly which combines both short and long reads. Additionally, Dr Wick is the developer of digital bioinformatic tools such as Bandage, Unicycler, Porechop, Filtlong, Badread, Trycycler, Polypolish and Autocycler. Dr. Wick earned a Bachelors from the University of Wisconsin, a Master of Science at the University of Melbourne, and Doctor of Philosophy under Dr. Kathryn Holt at the University of Monash.
Host:
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.
Find more resources on the ATCC Genome Portal
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