What We Do

Our research is currently focused on:

• Connecting the world’s biomedical data into a cohesive data biosphere. We are partners in the NIH initiatives NHLBI BioData Catalyst and NHGRI AnVIL that are building secure, scalable, and interoperable cloud ecosystems for biomedical research. We are proud members of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and contribute to developing and driving technical standards for genomic data.

• Comparing the history of vertebrate genomes. Want to reconstruct a 65 million old genome from the genomes of its descendants? Talk to us! We love the Vertebrate Genomes Project, a project to sequence all extant vertebrate genomes.

• Using next-next generation sequencing technology to create complete telomere-to-telomere genomes.

• Making it easy to create, discover, and share portable, reproducible, and scalable genomic workflows with Dockstore.

• Analyzing massive genomic datasets using the cloud.

• Building a human reference pangenome structure that contains all common variation as a universal basis for genomics. We are partners in the driving force behind this effort, the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium.

• Completing the library of human and mouse RNAs.

• Helping to build the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Data Coordination Platform (DCP) which is profiling millions of human cells, a process that generates enormous amounts of data that scientists need to store, standardize and interpret. The DCP is a cloud-based platform where scientists can share, organise and interrogate single-cell data.

We recruit graduate students in the UCSC Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics (BMEB) and the Department of Computer Science (CS) Graduate Programs at UC Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering.