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

It's finally finished!

March 31, 2022

We are hiring!

October 27, 2021

The complete sequence of a human genome

July 23, 2021

The (near) complete sequence of a human genome

September 22, 2020
Publications
Minmers are a generalization of minimizers that enable unbiased local Jaccard estimation
bioRxiv, May 18, 2023
Kille B, Garrison E, Treangen T, Phillippy AM
Recombination between heterologous human acrocentric chromosomes
Nature, May 10, 2023
Guarracino A, Buonaiuto S, de Lima LG, Potapova T, Rhie A, Koren S, Rubinstein B, Fischer C, Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, Gerton JL, Phillippy AM, Colonna V, Garrison E
Reference genomes of channel catfish and blue catfish reveal multiple pericentric chromosome inversions
BMC Biology, April 3, 2023
Waldbieser GC, Liu S, Yuan Z, Older CE, Gao D, Shi C, Bosworth BG, Li N, Bao L, Kirby MA, Jin Y, Wood ML, Scheffler B, Simpson S, Youngblood RC, Duke MV, Ballard L, Phillippy A, Koren S, Liu Z