Meet the experts

Microbiome Platform analysts

Dean Vik

Dean Vik, PhD

Bioinformatics Scientist

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I’m a PhD trained bioinformatition with a background in viral ecogenomics, metagenomics, and ecological statistics. My primary focus during my early training was to develop the “rules” and tools needed to identify novel archaeal viruses in unique environments, particularly deep oxygen limited marine environments. During this process, a specialty in manually curating viral genomes from functional annotations (is this a dsDNA virus or something else), Auxiliary metabolic genes, and conducting community ecological comparisons based on differential abundances became my mainstays. My role in the CoMS microbiome platform is to develop and maintain automated pipelines that process a variety of sample types (metagenomes, viromes, metatranscriptomes, etc…) from raw reads through the analytical steps to be able to answer the questions: What organisms/transcripts are present and in what abundance? What genes do they encode? What proportion of my sample do they encompass? What metabolisms are they involved with? 

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Christine Sun, PhD

Bioinformatics Scientist · Computational Biologist

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Bio and expertise here

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Garrett Smith, PhD

Microbiome Concierge & Data Analyst

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Bio and expertise here

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