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
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
Gapless assembly of complete human and plant chromosomes using only nanopore sequencing
bioRxiv, March 17, 2024
Koren S, Bao Z, Guarracino A, Ou S, Goodwin S, Jenike KM, Lucas J, McNulty B, Park J, Rautianinen M, Rhie A, Roelofs D, Schneiders H, Vrijenhoek I, Nijbroek K, Ware D, Schatz MC, Garrison E, Huang S, McCombie WR, Miga KH, Wittenberg AHJ, Phillippy AM
A high-quality blue whale genome, segmental duplications, and historical demography
Molecular Biology and Evolution, February 20, 2024
Bukhman YV … Rhie APhillippy AM … Stewart R
Parsnp 2.0: Scalable core-genome alignment for massive microbial datasets
bioRxiv, January 31, 2024
Kille B, Nute MG, Huang V, Kim E, Phillippy AM, Treangen TJ