Adam Phillippy, PhD

Senior Investigator

adam.phillippynih.gov

Adam is a Senior Investigator and Head of the Genome Informatics Section at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). His lab develops efficient computational methods for analyzing DNA sequencing data, including tools for genome assembly, alignment, clustering, forensics, and metagenomics. He is a co-founder of the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium and Vertebrate Genomes Project, which seek to enable the complete and gapless assembly of human and all other vertebrate genomes. He 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.

Software

Verkko

Verkko is a hybrid genome assembly pipeline developed for telomere-to-telomere assembly of long accurate (e.g. PacBio HiFi) and ultra-long (e.g. Oxford Nanopore UL) reads. Verkko is Finnish for net, mesh and graph.

Merqury

Evaluate genome assemblies with k-mers and more

Winnowmap

A long-read mapping algorithm optimized for mapping ONT and PacBio reads to repetitive reference sequences.

MetaMaps

Long-read metagenomic analysis
News posts

Going ape for T2T

November 27, 2023

The Q100 project

October 31, 2023

A complete Y chromosome

August 23, 2023

It's finally finished!

March 31, 2022
Publications
Comparative genomics of macaques and integrated insights into genetic variation and population history
bioRxiv, April 8, 2024
Zhang S … Phillippy AM … Mao Y
The variation and evolution of complete human centromeres
Nature, April 3, 2024
Logsdon GA, Rozanski AN, Ryabov F, Potapova T, Shepelev VA, Catacchio CR, Porubsky D, Mao Y, Yoo D, Rautiainen M, Koren S, Nurk S, Lucas JK, Hoekzema K, Munson KM, Gerton JL, Phillippy AM, Ventura M, Alexandrov IA, Eichler EE
The genome of the colonial hydroid Hydractinia reveals their stem cells utilize a toolkit of evolutionarily shared genes with all animals
Genome Research, March 20, 2024
Schnitzler CE … Koren SPhillippy AM … Baxevanis AD