Research Interests and Accomplishments

Erin Beck is a Lead Bioinformatics Engineer in the Informatics Department at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). She joined The Institute in 2006. She provides engineering support to the Prokaryotic team.

Previously she has worked on multiple web resources at The Institute including The Comprehensive Microbial Resource (CMR), Pathema, TIGRFAMs, Genome Properties and the Maize Cell Genomics Database. Currently her focus is on JCVI’s Pangenome pipeline which uses JCVI’s Pan-genome Ortholog Clustering Tool (PanOCT) to allow for analysis of closely related prokaryotic species and strains. This method uses conserved gene neighborhood in addition to homology to accurately place proteins in orthologous clusters.

Mrs. Beck earned her M.S. in Bioinformatics from Johns Hopkins University (’10) and her B.S. in Bioinformatics & Computational Studies from The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (’06).

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