Owen R. White PhD

Dr. White is the Director of the Bioinformatics department at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) and a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

The IGS Bioinformatics group annotates (or interprets and analyses) the huge strings of sequencing data from genomic and biomedical researchers at the center. Dr. White and the IGS Bioinformatics department are involved in large-scale annotation, ontology development and data sharing. They are the lead institution for the Human Microbiome Project’s central data repository or the Data Analysis and Coordination Center (known as the HMP DACC).

The HMP was launched by the National Institutes of Health to fuel research into the microbes that live in the various environments of the human body, and to look for correlations between changes in the microbiome and human health. The HMP DACC is the central repository for all HMP data, providing specialized data management and analysis infrastructure to facilitate discoveries about the microbiome.