Brandi Cantarel

Biography

In 2006, Dr. Cantarel received a PhD in Biochemistry in the Structural and Computational Biology, Biophysics program from the University of Virginia. She spent one years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah, where she was part of the team that developed MAKER, a eukaryotic genome annotation package. Then she spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the CNRS in Marseille, France. While in France, she began to work in an emerging field of metagenomics while developing new tools for carbohydrate active enzyme gene classification. In 2009, she moved to the University of Maryland, School of Medicine’s Institute for Genome Science, starting out as a bioinformatics analyst before join the faculty on the research track. Because the University of Maryland was the Data Analysis and Coordination Center for the Human Microbiome Project (http://www.hmpdacc.org), Dr Cantarel acted as a scientific coordinator for the project and chaired the genes of interest committee, in addition to leading the data analysis for a number of heath-association projects and characterizing the carbohydrate active enzymes in the various body sites of the human body.

Research Interest

Animal Associated Microbiome; Bacterial Genomics; Cancer Genomics Eukaryotic Genomics Next Generation Sequence (NGS) Analysis;; Whole Genome/Exome Variant Analysis; Transcriptomics; Epigenomics