Robert Clifford Email & Phone Number

US Army civilian employee at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) Multidrug-resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network (MRSN)• Provide guidance for MRSN staffing, technology acquisition and strategic direction.• Supervise and mentor five members of the MRSN bioinformatics team.• Direct bioinformatics research efforts, including: molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and virulence; molecular epidemiology of pathogens; genomic characterization of emerging infectious diseases.• Guide development of new bioinformatics tools.• Oversee the refinement of MRSN’s bacterial genome assembly and annotation pipeline.• Act as a subject matter expert for the development of a relational database of demographic, phenotypic and genomic data for multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens.• Participate in national initiatives to identify and combat antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Contract employee at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) Multidrug-resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network (MRSN)• Supervise MRSN bioinformatics staff.• Enhance systems used to collect, maintain and display genetic, phenotypic, epidemiological and demographic information about multidrug-resistance pathogens.• Guide the development of a bioinformatics pipeline for bacterial genome analysis.• Develop computer programs used by the U.S. Army to identify multidrug-resistant bacterial strains based on their antimicrobial susceptibility profiles.• Create computer programs to analyze the results of antimicrobial resistance proficiency testing needed to maintain MRSN’s CAP accreditation.

Supervise three research scientists who provide bioinformatics support to the principal investigators in the Laboratory of Population Genetics and their collaborators.

Studied C. elegans germline sex determination in the laboratory of Dr. Tim Schedl.

Phd, Molecular Biology

Investigated Drosophila oogenesis and embryogenesis with Dr. Trudi Schupbach.

Ba, Biology, Philosophy