Dr Richard White III

Rick has been collaborating with Brendan Burns for over six years, acting as an excellent mentor for several graduate students from the Burns lab. Rick has extensive experience in analysis of ‘big data’ from a range of environments including marine, freshwater, soil, and human. His research has an ecological focus and he is extremely adept at designing, conducting, and determining the statistical significance of data obtained. Rick has also developed a range of bioinformatic skills and pipelines to analyse massive datasets generated through next generation technology. In particular he has developed a sophisticated platform for optimization of sequencing procedures, including absolute calibration of DNA/RNA libraries for NextGen sequencing that was lodged as a US patent. Furthermore, Dr White has developed a novel bioinformatics pipeline, ATLAS (automatic tool for local assembly structures), which is a modular pipeline for gene prediction, annotation, quantification, and binning genomes. The ATLAS framework can assemble, annotate, and bin metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, and single cell sequence data. This will be freely available for researchers to use and is an invaluable tool. Currently working as a post-doc at Washington State University, Dr White is also an Associate Member of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology.