Friday was my last day at NHGRI. After 10 wonderful years, my lab is headed one hour north on I-95 to set up shop at Johns Hopkins University. This is a very bittersweet move for me, as NHGRI has provided an incredibly supportive environment for my research, both in terms of colleagues and resources, and it’s hard to say goodbye. However, I am excited for the opportunity to tackle some new challenges at JHU.

Joining NHGRI in 2015 is one of the best decisions I ever made. I am so lucky to have been surrounded and supported by inspiring colleagues, whose positive examples have pushed me to be not just a better scientist, but a better person. Add in the amazing research environment of the NIH, and I can’t think of a better home over the past 10 years. I still remember being awestruck during my hiring interview with the great Dan Kastner, and I’m grateful that my last week at NHGRI ended with a heartwarming symposium in his honor.

For those that don’t know my history, moving the lab to Baltimore is a bit of a homecoming. My career in genomics started as an undergraduate researcher with Art Delcher at Loyola University Maryland (then Loyola College), just a few blocks north of JHU’s Homewood campus. I’ve bounced around Maryland ever since: TIGR in Rockville → University of Maryland in College Park → NBACC in Frederick → NHGRI in Bethesda. I’m looking forward to coming “home” to Bmore.

Fitting for an antedisciplinary scientist, my appointments at JHU will include the departments of Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Genetic Medicine, and my lab will join me over the coming months. Stay tuned for more updates to follow, as we aim to make “telomere-to-telomere” genomes the new basis of clinical genomics. If you’ve read our latest preprint on personalized genomes, you know what’s next. If we want to understand the genome, we need to read the whole thing. My lab will continue the work we started at NHGRI, making the sequencing and interpretation of T2T genomes routine.

Farewell NHGRI. You will always be a part of me. Thank you for everything ❤️

NHGRI Symposium 2019