People

David Mark Welch

Co-Director, The Microbiome Center
Director of the Josephine Bay Paul Center
Senior Scientist
Marine Biological Laboratory

David Mark Welch

Dr David Mark Welch is an evolutionary biologist who uses comparative genomics to investigate a wide range of questions from the biology of aging to patterns of microbial diversity on global and local scales.  David was part of the team that first used 454 sequencing of marker gene amplicons to examine microbial diversity and that documented the existence of the Rare Biosphere of microbial taxa.  He developed some of the first tools for processing next-generation amplicon sequence data and led the bioinformatic analysis for the International Census of Marine Microbes.  He currently leads development of the VAMPS website (vamps.mbl.edu) for collaborative, interactive, visual analysis of microbial diversity data, and is co-founder of the MBL summer course Strategies and Techniques for Analyzing Microbial Population Structures.  David earned his PhD in Biochemistry from Harvard University in 1999 and has been at the MBL since 2001.  He succeeded Mitch Sogin as Director of the Josephine Bay Paul Center in 2013

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