Research Interests and Accomplishments

Dr. Pickett received his Ph.D. training in Microbiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham on the various mechanisms influencing the evolution of Flaviviruses. His postdoctoral work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, provided an opportunity to continue this comparative sequence analysis on viral genomes as well as additional understanding about the host immune response while contributing to the development of NIAID-sponsored viral databases as part of the Bioinformatics Resource Centers program. Positions at both the J. Craig Venter Institute and Thomson Reuters Life Sciences enabled him to develop statistical algorithms and bioinformatics workflows to interpret transcriptomic and systems biology data through pathway analysis and protein interaction networks. This work has been the product of successful collaborations with many prestigious domestic and international labs, with the data and results being reported at scientific conferences and in multiple peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Pickett currently focuses his effort on large-scale pathogen sequencing, host transcriptional RNA-seq during infection, and downstream bioinformatics analysis to better understand the underlying mechanism(s) of the host response during and after infections with viral pathogens.

Research Priorities

Predict, generate, and test serodiagnostic peptides having potential application to differentiate prior infection with multiple mosquito-borne viruses.

• Useful against: Dengue 1-4, Japanese Encephalitis, St Louis encephalitis, West Nile, Yellow fever, and Zika viruses
• Identify immunodominant epitopes from peptide array experiments using data mining techniques

Apply statistical workflows to mine existing viral genome data for evolutionary trends and host transcriptomic data for druggable signaling pathways.

• Comparative genomics for:
  • Dengue viruses
  • Influenza virus
  • Hepatitis C virus
  • Zika virus

Contribute to the development of the NIH-funded Virus Pathogen Resource (ViPR) bioinformatics resource center (www.viprbrc.org) and the Influenza Research Database (IRD; www.fludb.org).

• Store and analyze “-omics” data using pathway enrichment algorithms
• Develop and integrate bioinformatics tools, statistical processes, and analytical workflows
• Design an API-based method to run intensive analyses on a high-performance computing platform

Select Publications