COVID-19 Genomic Epidemiology Toolkit Developer: Shatavia Morrison, PhD

Bioinformatics Unit Lead

Waterborne Diseases Prevention Branch
Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases
National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases

Shatavia Morrison, PhD, developed bioinformatics and whole genome sequencing training material for the COVID-19 Genomic Epidemiology Toolkit. This material helps epidemiologists understand techniques that can provide higher-resolution data for investigating COVID-19 outbreaks.

Dr. Morrison is the Bioinformatics Unit Lead in the CDC’s Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch, Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. Her primary research interests are metagenomics analysis of environmental water samples and detection and characterization of Cryptosporidiosis spp., Naegleria fowleri, and free-living amebae from “-omics” related sequencing datasets. She is also exploring informatics techniques to deploy rapid bioinformatics analytics in resource-limited environments. Dr. Morrison received a BA in Software and Information Systems and her doctorate in Bioinformatics from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“We developed this toolkit to assist public health officials who are in the beginning stages of leveraging bioinformatics and nextgeneration sequencing to investigate SAR-CoV-2 outbreaks. It’s going to take every skill set—laboratory capacity, informatics, bioinformatics, and epidemiology—to combat one of the largest public health events in modern- day history.”