Second Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
29 October -2 November 2022

Dr Derrick Fouts (Participant)

Dr. Fouts has a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a Professor in the Department of Genomic Medicine at the JCVI. He is a multi-PI and PI of the Data Management and Analysis Core (DMAC) with responsibility for the technical oversight of the DMAC and all activities at JCVI. He will interact with the overall PI to optimize genomic analysis strategies and to help train and increase informatics analysis capacity in Africa. He has over 30 years of experience and over 100 publications in molecular microbiology, bacteriophage and bacterial genetics and genomics, synthetic genomics, bioinformatics and metagenomics. He was the Project Director of the NIAID-funded GCID Bacterial Project, which sequenced and compared over 2,000 genomes of both Gram-negative and Gram-positive pathogens to understand the molecular basis and transfer of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes, working with a large network of clinicians, including Dr. Obaro and Dr. Bonomo (Cleveland VA). Previous collaboration with Dr. Obaro resulted in genomic characterization of NDM5-containing Klebsiella quasipneumoniae that was responsible for a neonatal outbreak in Nigeria (PMC6416368). Under GCID funding, he co-developed Ometa with Indresh Singh, an ontology-based, data-driven metadata tracking system, to track all of our metadata for the GCID bacterial project (PMC6322262). He also worked with the US CDC to create a comprehensive, functional public health database of AMR genes and AMR gene tracking tool. Lastly, co-developed PanOCT, a pan-genome software tool that clusters orthologs using conserved gene neighborhoods and the pan-genome visualization software, PANACEA. These tools and others he helped co-develop will be used to analyze the bacterial genomes sequenced in CAMRA Project 1.