Ussery brings global genomics expertise to OSU College of Veterinary Medicine

Ussery brings global genomics expertise to OSU College of Veterinary Medicine

Friday, December 5, 2025

Media Contact: Bailey Horn | Marketing Specialist | 405-744-6728 | [email protected]

Dr. Dave Ussery, a leading bioinformatician with more than three decades of experience in microbial genomics, joined the Oklahoma State University College of Veterinary Medicine in 2025.

Ussery serves as a professor in the Department of Physiological Sciences and as director of the Interdisciplinary Network for Tracking Emerging Risks, Analytics, and Comparative Translational genomics (INTERACT). In this role, he helps advance OSU's One Health mission by connecting clinicians, scientists and industry partners to address complex biological and medical challenges.

Ussery previously held the Helen G. Adams/ARA Endowed Chair in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where he served as a professor in both the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology and the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Before his time at UAMS, he led comparative genomics groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Technical University of Denmark. He also served on the board of the Genomic Standards Consortium.

His research has focused on analyzing bacterial genomes using computational tools. He began working in bacterial genomics in 1994, when large-scale genome sequencing was still emerging. Ussery produced some of the earliest visualizations in the field, including the first "genome atlas" of E. coli, a graphical summary of the organism's 4.6 million base-pair chromosome.

His collaborative studies have provided insights into organisms across the tree of life, including Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Aspergillus niger, offering new understanding of gene function, metabolism and evolution.

Ussery has contributed several widely used resources to the genomics community. He co-developed RNAmmer, a computational tool that identifies ribosomal RNA genes using hidden Markov models. He also helped introduce Minimum Information about a Genome Sequence, or MIGS, a standard for reporting genomic data. His work in multilocus sequence typing and reference-free genome assembly has supported advances in bacterial identification, metagenomics and comparative genomics.

Throughout his career, Ussery has authored or co-authored more than 170 papers that have been cited at least 10 times and has published in journals including Nature, Science and PNAS. He has mentored 34 Ph.D. students, nearly all of whom published multiple first-author papers. He has also served on journal editorial boards and grant review panels for more than 30 years. In 2025, he was an author of eight published research papers he led or collaborated on.

At OSU, Ussery teaches a project-based genomics course focused on sequencing, comparative analysis and emerging technologies such as long-read sequencing. Students use a specialized software suite, R-BioTools, to analyze microbial genomes and gain hands-on experience with modern genomic workflows.

Through his research, teaching and leadership of INTERACT, Ussery is helping OSU strengthen scientific discovery, interdisciplinary collaboration and real-world applications in veterinary and biomedical science. His career reflects a continued commitment to innovation and a deep interest in understanding life at the genomic level.