Callum J. Bell, Ph.D., Vice President for Research
Dr. Bell’s main interest is in turning advances in genome sequencing into changes in clinical practice. He joined NCGR in 2008 to work on a carrier screening test to identify couples at risk of having children with severe Mendelian diseases. In plant genomics Dr. Bell leads NCGR’s contribution to the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance, a $40 million USDA grant aimed at developing biofuels from forestry waste products. He is also the principal investigator of a project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to sequence the transcriptomes of several hundred marine eukaryotic microbes.
Joann Mudge, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Mudge works on structural genomics, studying how genomes are organized and how genome structure controls gene expression and phenotypes. Her main focus is plants (especially legumes) and plant pathogens. She was part of the team that sequenced the Medicago truncatula genome. Further, she is a co-PI on the NSF-funded Medicago truncatula Hapmap project which recently resequenced over 300 M. truncatula accessions. She is currently assembling and analyzing cotton and alfalfa genomes as well as the genome of a plant pathogen. She has also worked in human genomics, playing a major role in the sequencing of the 6th ever genome, and of female monozygotic twins discordant for multiple sclerosis.
Andrew Farmer, Bioinformatics Fellow
Mr. Farmer’s interests focus on plant genomics with an emphasis on agricultural systems important to global food security and environmental stability. He collaborates with academic and industry partners to characterize diversity in deep germplasm collections and in many "orphan" species, and to develop new reference data sets or leverage resources from well-studied crops or model systems. His aspirations include contributing to the understanding of genotype/phenotype correlations using integrative analytical and visualization techniques encompassing both the dimension of the diversity of datatypes such as transcriptome and epigenetic profiling, and the dimension of intra-organismal diversity.
