Julie Messersmith, Executive Director for Research at Johns Hopkins, discusses her roles in the strategies involved in bringing multi-disciplinary researchers together to work on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. She shares information about the program for coordinated response with 9 working groups that were formed shortly after Hopkins shut down non essential work and research. She also discusses testing at Hopkins, genomics work on both the virus and hosts, and possible treatments in development at Hopkins. You can find Julie on twitter @JMessersmith_JH and more information about Julie and her roles at Hopkins here: https://research.jhu.edu/our-team/julie-messersmith/ The Hopkins COVID-19 tracking page is of course here: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html In the episode we refer to Denis Wertz by first name only but you can find out more about him here: https://engineering.jhu.edu/chembe/faculty/denis-wirtz/

In a special episode, I speak to Elodie Ghedin about the pandemic and global health crisis we are facing. Elodie is a virologist and professor at NYU in Biology and Global Public Health. She studies microbial pathogens including human parasites and viruses and has done extensive work with influenza and other RNA viruses. In this episode we talk about the coronavirus that causes covid-19, from its emergence at the end of 2019 to the current crisis, and hopes for future treatments and vaccines. Elodie educates us on R0 (R nought) and the problems with the slow ramp up of testing in the United States. We also talk about how the genomics community is helping with real-time analysis of the pandemic. You can find Elodie on twitter @eghedin and her lab page is here: https://publichealth.nyu.edu/faculty/elodie-ghedin Some of the resources we mention in the podcast can be found below. https://nextstrain.org/ https://platform.gisaid.org/

Deanna Church talks about her early work on cri-du-chat syndrome, mouse developmental biology (plus the allergy she developed!), her time at NCBI working on the mouse reference genome and improving and standardizing the human reference genome, GRCh38. We also get to hear about her work at companies such as Personalis, 10X Genomics, and now at Inscripta, where she works with tools to accelerate genome editing using CRISPR . Deanna also discusses finding a good mentor and a good project and how biology is the ultimate integration problem requiring a multidisciplinary effort! You can find Deanna on twitter @deannachurch

Maria talks about starting her own company right out of grad school, working for DNAnexus and Google, solving visualization problems, deep learning in genomics, and so much more. You can find links to Maria’s tools and bioinformatics training videos here: http://omgenomics.com

Adam is well known for many bioinformatics tools including MUMmer, Canu, Mash, Krona, and we talk about the development of them, TIGR history lessons, long reads, and so much more. You can find out more about Adam here: https://irp.nih.gov/pi/adam-phillippy

In this episode I talk to Alexis Battle about her experiences from Stanford as an undergrad, as an engineer at Google, her PhD experience, and the work she has done at Johns Hopkins using machine learning to understand rare variants and the human genome. A link to the Battle Lab: https://www.bme.jhu.edu/faculty_staff/alexis-battle-phd/