New suite of features enables analysis of amplicon and geochemistry data

Ben Allen coordinates outreach and user development activities to build the KBase user community while engaging in scientific collaborations to advance the use of the platform. His background in biochemistry and science education helps him develop protocols and training materials that provide depth while being accessible to a wide audience. Research interests include systems biology, microbial ecology, bioremediation studies, and biology education.

Shane Canon is a project engineer in the Data and Analytics Services group at NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and is a senior member of the KBase project where he co-leads advanced development.   Shane has focused his career on enabling data-intensive applications on HPC platforms and more recently on leverage HPC and large scale computing to enable bioinformatics. Shane has held a number of positions at NERSC including leading the Technology Integration group, where he focused on the Magellan Project and other areas of strategic focus, and leading the Data Systems group which managed the global file systems and other data systems.  Shane has also served as a group leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he architected the 10 petabyte Spider filesystem. Shane holds a PhD in physics from Duke University and a BS in physics from Auburn University. 

Zach Crockett is a member of the outreach, communications, and user development team. His background is in biochemistry and cellular biology. He has professional experience in medical lab science testing information management systems, creating training plans, improving processes, and developing standard operating procedures.

Janaka N. Edirisinghe is a Computational Biologist in Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). He has inter-disciplinary background in the areas of System Biology, Microbial Physiology and Molecular Genetics. He got his BSc in Computer Science, MSc in Bioinformatics and Ph.D in Microbial Physiology. He has been an integral member of the ModelSEED team at ANL headed by Chris Henry and contributed to the implementation of automated model construction pipelines of prokaryotes and Fungi. He has joined the KBase project in its beginning days and has been contributing as a scientist, educator and as a developer. His research interests are focused on bacterial and fungal modeling, community interactions, use of cheminformatics in novel pathway identification and multi-omics integration.As an educator, he has conducted numerous hands-on workshops, webinars and presented at conferences over the years in distributing and sharing the knowledge among the scientific community. He can be found in Github, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, PubFacts

Sean Jungbluth pursued a Ph.D. in Oceanography studying microbial life in the deep subseafloor. In the search for novel life in extreme environments, I used submarines and developed custom sampling equipment to extract rock-hosted fluids circulating hundreds of meters below the seafloor. Leveraging DNA sequencing techniques, self-taught coding skills, and supercomputers, I’ve forged a career making stories from DNA sequencing data and discovering novel microbial lineages. Currently, I am working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Data Scientist on the DOE Systems Biology Knowledge Base (KBase) project where my goals are to democratize access to bioinformatic analysis tools and support reproducible genomic science. For more information, check out my personal webpage, Github, or Google Scholar.