Research Interests and Accomplishments

Dr. Samuel Levy, Director in Human Genomics at the J. Craig Venter Institute, has an ongoing interest in characterizing and refining the structure and function of the genome and epigenome in human populations. Dr. Levy was the leading scientist on the first published diploid genome sequence of a human, J. Craig Venter (PLoS Biology 5, e254), and he leads ongoing studies of functional characterization of DNA variants in protein coding and cis-regulatory regions. Dr. Levy also provides contract-based gene resequencing services for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and has worked with over ten different research groups over the last three years providing high throughput discovery of DNA variants on clinical samples for disease association studies.

Prior to joining JCVI in 2002 Dr Levy work at Celera Genomics for a three year period and was involved in developing computational tools for gene discovery and functional annotation in the Drosophila and human genome sequences. Prior to his work at Celera Genomics, from 1989-1999, Dr. Levy was a postdoctoral worker and then independent investigator in the Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the MCDB department he worked on a variety of projects ranging from extracellular Golgi-based trafficking in plants, plant cell wall development and structure-function relationship in complex carbohydrates using a range of approaches involving biochemistry, cell biology and computational chemistry.

Dr. Levy received a B.Sc. in Molecular Biophysics at the University of Leeds, UK in 1982 and his Ph.D. in cell and computational biology at the University of Bristol, UK in 1986. He was in receipt of a NATO/SERC postdoctoral fellowship for a two-year period studying structural and biochemical changes in plant cell walls at the Ecole Normale Superieure, France.

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