Derek Hart Email & Phone Number

Washington, DC, US

Atlanta, Georgia, United States

• Working on-site at the CDC in the Viral Vaccine Preventable Disease Branch
• Built and deployed production-level NGS data analysis workflows for nationwide surveillance of measles and mumps. Extensive use of Snakemake, Nextflow, Python, Linux, and HPC systems.
• Created cloud-based ETL pipeline and SQL database with Azure and Databricks to rapidly assess proficiency of >100 molecular laboratories worldwide. Features real-time data ingestion and processing.
• Developed R Shiny dashboard to aggregate and visualize a global measles sequence database. Created interactive timeline charts, geographic map plots, and phylogenetic trees using popular Javascript libraries (e.g. D3.
• Collaborated with microbiologists to optimize tiling amplicon enrichment assay, enabling high coverage depth even for high-Ct samples in non-coding regions.
• Communicated methods & results in multiple peer-reviewed publications, and at multiple global network conferences.

Greater Atlanta Area

• Designed and implemented single-molecule FRET microscopy assay to observe kinetics of short DNA duplexes subject to weak tensile force. Highly experienced with image and signal processing methods.
• Performed molecular dynamics simulations on high-performance cluster (HPC). Used advanced statistical sampling methods to observe energy landscape of rare transition states. Extensive use of Python data science.
• 5 years of wet lab experience performing DNA/RNA-based protocols.

Atlanta, Georgia, United States

o Evaluated exams, labs, and homework with course instructors weekly to improve student outcomeso Mentored students one-on-one during laboratory sections and office hours

Gaithersburg, MD

o Calibrated advanced mass sensor instruments used in ongoing research during an 8-week summer programo Independently learned to operate and extract data from a laser Doppler vibrometer o Presented results to a scientific audience in a public talk

Los Alamos, NM

o Explored using nuclear magnetic resonance methods to measure the water content in drought-stricken aspens in a 10-week summer program.o Presented novel methods and results in both a written report and poster presentation

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Single-Molecule Biophysics

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Engineering Physics