John Spouge, MD, PhD - Senior Investigator, Computational Biology Branch, NCBI
My research interests flow from my technical mathematical skills, particularly in sequence statistics, which I apply to solve specific problems with broad biological pertinence. For example, I have used in vitro or animal trial data to model the efficacy of HIV therapies in patients. I have also analyzed data for botanists and mycologists in International Barcode Consortium Working Groups to help them decide on DNA barcodes for plants and fungi/
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/researchstaff/SpougeJohn.html
Transcript
[John Spouge, MD, PhD] I have a background in mathematics, a PhD in fact, and an MD.
And I spent a lot of the early part of the 80s trying to combine the two backgrounds. And so, when NCBI was created in 1989, it was an amazing opportunity for me because here was recognition of both backgrounds simultaneously.
I certainly had an opportunity to live my life as a physician, but I felt that I could contribute by actually moving society forward with the research.
The research that I'm doing falls into a couple of distinct categories - virology and taxonomy. The interest in virology made it relatively easy for me to study COVID.
And so I actually became very interested in the initial phase of the epidemic, and what it could tell you about the basic reproduction number "R-NAUGHT", which is the basis of Public Health policy.
One of my more recent papers was to estimate the basic reproduction number for COVID in 152 countries. It was an unusual feat because it required regularizing a lot of data.
One of the most important areas that I have worked on is definitely taxonomy. The basic idea is dividing the genomes of different species up into short segments which you then compare to a database to identify the species.
I am very proud of the fact that I was involved in the conferences on plants and fungi - for selecting the genes for identifying species in those organisms called DNA barcoding. And barcoding was established in animals but not in plants or fungi. Both conferences for barcoding needed someone to crunch the data and I really was very glad that I could do that.
I think the future of NLM lies in bringing a lot of the data analysis, that we do as research now, directly into a hospital. To be able to set up clinical trials relatively easily, to be able to collect data in standardized formats, and all of these things would make prediction and diagnosis much easier.