Professor David Ussery was born and raised in Springdale, Arkansas. He has been working with bioinforma6c 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 6mes, and more than a hundred papers that have been cited at least 10 6mes 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 Informa6cs. More than 30 one-week “Compara6ve Genomics” workshops have been held in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. DU has collabora6ve 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 Na6onal Labs, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (2013-2016). He led the Compara6ve 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 bioinforma6cs.
Dr. Ussery received a doctorate in Molecular Biology in 1993 from The University of Cincinna6 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
