COVID-19 Genomic Epidemiology Toolkit Developer: Russ Corbett-Detig, PhD

Assistant Professor

Biomolecular Engineering Department
University of California, Santa Cruz

Russ Corbett-Detig, PhD, and his team conceived and designed Ultrafast Sample Placement on Existing tRees (UShER) and the UShER web portal. This platform is designed to be a user-friendly tool for rapidly inferring the relationships among newly sampled and existing SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences.

Dr. Corbett-Detig is an assistant professor in the Biomolecular Engineering Department and an affiliate of the Genomics Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His team conducts research on a wide range of questions and approaches in computational and evolutionary genomics. Dr. Corbett-Detig received his PhD from Harvard University and completed a two-year post-doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

“My team developed UShER and the web portal to help researchers and public health officials rapidly interpret newly sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes. I believe that everybody can make important contributions in the fight against the virus and we are delighted to lend our expertise in computational and evolutionary genomics to make these data more accessible and more powerful in the hands of users.”