Research Interests and Accomplishments

Richard H. Scheuermann, Ph.D., Director of Informatics at JCVI, received a B.S. in Life Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.  After completing his doctoral research on bacterial replication fidelity at U.C. Berkeley, he accepted an independent research position at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland, where he identified the CDP protein as a critical regulator of immunoglobulin gene expression and the role of nuclear matrix attachment in transcription regulation.  In 1992 he joined the faculty in the Department of Pathology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas where he rose to the rank of Professor with tenure.  In 2012, after 20 years on the faculty of U.T. Southwestern, Dr. Scheuermann pulled up his roots and moved to San Diego to become the Director of Informatics at JCVI.

While at U.T. Southwestern, Dr. Scheuermann established a productive research program investigating signal transduction pathways that regulate normal lymphocyte development and function and that induce cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in lymphomas, supported through numerous research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and other granting agencies.  In the Pathology Department, he also worked on the development and validation of novel diagnostic methods for viruses that mediate chronic infectious disease and for chromosomal translocations that drive leukemia and lymphoma development.  In 2001 he made a dramatic career shift into the discipline of bioinformatics, initiated with a sabbatical year at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.

Since 2001, Dr. Scheuermann has applied his deep knowledge in molecular immunology and infectious disease toward the development of novel computational data mining methods and knowledge representation approaches, including the development of biomedical ontologies and their use in data mining, novel methods for the analysis of gene expression, protein network and flow cytometry data, and novel comparative genomics methods.  These knowledge representation approaches and computational methods have been made available to the research community through several public database and analysis resources, including the Influenza Research Database (IRD; www.fludb.org), the Virus Pathogen Resource (ViPR; www.viprbrc.org) and the Immunology Database and Analysis Portal (ImmPort; www.immport.org) supported by the National Institutes of Health.  At JCVI he is also expanding his bioinformatics research program into the area of human genomics.

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