Adam Phillippy

Dr. Phillippy is head of the Genome Informatics Section and a senior investigator in the Computational and Statistical Genomics Branch at NHGRI. He is a bioinformatician who bridges the fields of computer science and genomics, and his lab has developed numerous widely used tools for the problems of genome assembly, alignment, clustering, forensics and metagenomics.

Early in his career, Dr. Phillippy developed some of the first sequence alignment and variant calling methods able to compare whole genomes. These methods were integral to the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks and demonstrated the potential of whole-genome sequencing for outbreak tracing and forensics. After completing his Ph.D., he pioneered the use of single-molecule sequencing for the assembly of complete genomes and min-hashing for the comparison of large genomic datasets. He joined NHGRI in 2015 and co-founded the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium with the goal of finishing the human reference genome. Under his leadership, the consortium successfully completed this project 2021, revealing approximately 200 million bases of newly mapped human genomic sequence.

Dr. Phillippy received a B.S. in computer science from Loyola University Maryland in 2002, where he was advised by Dr. Arthur Delcher. He first worked as a bioinformatics engineer at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) with Dr. Mihai Pop, and later received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland in 2010 with Dr. Steven Salzberg. After graduate school he led a bioinformatics group at the National Bioforensics Analysis Center before joining NHGRI in 2015. In 2019, he was awarded tenure by the NIH and received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.