Associate Bioinformatics Scientist
Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
University of Delaware
Contact
Office: 147 Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center
Mailing address:
Delaware Biotechnology Institute
590 Avenue 1743, Suite 147
Newark, DE 19713
Phone: (302) 831-4410
FAX: (302) 831-4841
E-Mail: mmacd@udel.edu
Education
BS: Bioinformatics, Rochester Institute of Technology
PhD: Bioinformatics, University of Delaware
Research Interests
Virus detection and subsequent removal during biotherapeutic protein and vaccine production is of critical importance to ensure the final therapeutic product is free from any possible viral contamination. Viral detection using next generation sequencing (NGS) approaches have been proposed to replace or complement traditional in vitro and in vivo virus testing. However, further investigation into the bioinformatics methods used to classify viral sequencing reads is needed. I am currently testing several rapid viral metagenomics approaches on simulated NGS datasets and existing datasets from virus spike-in studies. The aim is to find an approach with high specificity and sensitivity, but also has speed, space, and memory usage requirements that would be appropriate for a web-based tool.