Justin Vaughn

Dr. Justin Vaughn received his doctoral degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, working with Albecht von Arnim to develop computational pipelines for comparative transcriptomics in plants.  As a postdoctoral researcher in Jeff Bennetzen's lab at the University of Georgia, Athens, Dr. Vaughn characterized structural variation in rice populations and used this data to develop new models of tandem duplication formation.  He also contributed to numerous genome sequencing projects ranging from orphan grains to culinary herbs.  He moved to Zenglu Li's group at the University of Georgia as a postdoctoral researcher and then research scientist.  There, he led efforts to characterize the global soybean germplasm as well as dissect the genetic architecture of key agronomic traits such as seed composition.  He is currently a computational biologist with the Genomics and Bioinformatics Research Unit at USDA-ARS.  There, his research group is building computational tools to expand to utility of emerging long read assemblies in agricultural genetics.  They have applied these tools to numerous systems including soybean, peanut, melon, and rice.