Richard H. Scheuermann, Ph.D. Joins J. Craig Venter Institute as Director of Informatics

SAN DIEGO and ROCKVILLE, Md., April 12, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) today announced that Richard H. Scheuermann, Ph.D. has joined the organization as the Director of Informatics effective May 1, 2012. He will be based in the San Diego, California facility and is responsible for leading and directing the informatics programs at both the JCVI Rockville, Maryland and San Diego campuses.

"We are very pleased to have Richard as part of the JCVI team," said J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., Founder and President, JCVI. "Advanced informatics has always been a cornerstone of our genomic research beginning in the earliest days with the development of expressed sequence tags and sequencing the Haemophilus influenzae genome. Richard's vast informatics expertise coupled with his immunology and infectious diseases experience makes him the ideal person to lead the informatics team and grow our ongoing research programs at JCVI. We look forward to continued advances in informatics with Richard and his team now at JCVI," Venter concluded.  

Scheuermann comes to JCVI from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (U.T. Southwestern) in Dallas, Texas where he worked from 1992 to 2012. He began his career there as an Assistant Professor and was steadily promoted to his last position of Professor in the Department of Pathology.

While at U.T. Southwestern, Scheuermann concentrated on a variety of research fronts including developing computational methods in gene expression microarray, biological network, ontology, flow cytometry and comparative genomics analysis to advance insights into immunology and infectious disease. He also held a number of academic administrative positions while at U.T. Southwestern including Director of the Division of Biomedical Informatics, Co-Director of the Division of Translational Pathology and Director of the Tissue Procurement Resource. In 2012 he was also appointed as a Research Professor II in the Department of Statistical Science at Southern Methodist University.

Scheuermann and his laboratory team (several of whom will be accompanying him to JCVI) have been very successful in securing substantial federal and state grants and contracts to support their research. They will continue their work as part of several of these grants and contracts at JCVI including: NIH/NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Center (BRC) for Infectious Diseases for which they are developing the Virus Pathogen Database and Analysis Resource (ViPR); and the Influenza Research Database (IRD); and the NIH/NIAID Bioinformatics Integration Support Contract for which they are developing a comprehensive scientific information management system, the Immunology Data Warehouse and Analysis Portal (ImmPort).

In 2002 Scheuermann took a sabbatical at the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego Supercomputer Center as a visiting scholar. While there he developed relational databases, web interfaces and data analysis algorithms to better understand signal transduction at the whole cellular level.

Prior to his career at U.T. Southwestern, Scheuermann was a research member at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland from 1986 to 1991.

Scheuermann received his Bachelor of Science degree in Life Sciences in 1981 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley.

About the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI)
The JCVI is a not-for-profit research institute in Rockville, MD and San Diego, CA dedicated to the advancement of the science of genomics; the understanding of its implications for society; and communication of those results to the scientific community, the public, and policymakers. Founded by J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., the JCVI is home to approximately 300 scientists and staff with expertise in human and evolutionary biology, genetics, bioinformatics/informatics, information technology, high-throughput DNA sequencing, genomic and environmental policy research, and public education in science and science policy. The legacy organizations of the JCVI are: The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), The Center for the Advancement of Genomics (TCAG), the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA), the Joint Technology Center (JTC), and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation. The JCVI is a 501 (c)(3) organization. For additional information, please visit http://www.JCVI.org.

SOURCE J. Craig Venter Institute