Professor David Ussery was born and raised in Springdale, Arkansas. He has been working with bioinformatic analysis of bacterial genomes since the first sequence was published in 1995. He lives his life vicariously through his Ph.D. students. Most of his papers have Ph.D. students as first authors; he has published six papers that have been cited more than a thousand times, and more than a hundred papers that have been cited at least 10 times in the past five years.
In December of 2021, his group sequenced the first Covid-19 Omicron variant in Arkansas, and is currently developing methods for monitoring wastewater from UAMS for pathogens. Dr. Ussery teaches several graduate courses in the UAMS Department of BioMedical Informatics. More than 30 one-week “Comparative Genomics” workshops have been held in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. DU has collaborative projects with groups in the UK, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, and Spain as well as in the U.S.
Prior to joining UAMS in 2016, Dr. Ussery was the Compara6ve Genomics Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Labs, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (2013-2016). He led the Comparative Microbial Genomics group at The Technical University of Denmark from 1997 – 2014, where he has successfully supervised more than two dozen Ph.D. students in bioinformatics.
Dr. Ussery received a doctorate in Molecular Biology in 1993 from The University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford University (1992-1996). He earned his master’s degree in biophysical chemistry at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1986. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from William Jewell College (Liberty, Missouri) in 1982, and graduated from Springdale High School (Springdale, Arkansas) in 1978.
ARA 2023
