W. Richard McCombie

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA

Biography

W. Richard McCombie, Ph.D., is a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Watson School of Biological Sciences. He is the Director of the Stanley Institute of Cognitive Genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and Program Leader for the Cancer Genetics at CSHL. He received his B.A. in Biology from Wabash College and his Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology in the Health Sciences from the University of Michigan. As a Senior Staff Fellow in Craig Venter’s section at the National Institutes of Health, he was a leader of one of the first groups to carry out large-scale automated sequencing of genomic DNA and helped to organize the first large-scale EST (expressed sequence tag) sequencing projects. He has been on the faculty at CSHL since 1992 and was named a professor in 2001. Professor McCombie’s lab has contributed to the efforts to sequence the genomes of several organisms, including the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the fission yeast S. pombe, rice, mouse and human. The McCombie lab has also focused considerable effort on the development of methods and strategies for genome analysis. These have included development of exome sequencing methyl filtration in plants and as well as contributing to the first single cell analysis of cancer. An author of many published papers in the field of genomics, Professor McCombie has developed and taught courses on applications of genome sequencing and on genomics and proteomics at the Watson School of Biological Sciences at CSHL. He has also organized an intensive DNA sequencing course at CSHL. Professor McCombie and colleagues are currently developing optimized ways to carry out de novo assemblies of plant genomes using next generation sequencing approaches and newer, long read base sequencing instruments. They are also using these approaches to determine the salient variation contributing to human disease.