Andrew Farmer
National Center for Genome Resources, Bioinformatics Fellow

Mr. Farmer's work focuses on the use of bioinformatics to address questions in plant biology, with an emphasis on enabling crop improvement efforts though the development of clade-oriented information resources utilizing phylogenetic and comparative genomic analyses. He leads NCGR participation in the USDA-funded  Legume Information System (http://legumeinfo.org) as a collaborative effort with partners at Iowa State University and USDA-ARS. He also serves as co-PI on an NSF-funded grant to develop a federation of independently developed and separately maintained web-based genomic data resources in the legume family, the Legume Federation (http://legumefederation.org). His current research interests are focused on how plant species have adapted to a wide range of environments through diversification mechanisms associated with large scale genome duplications, while at the same time maintaining core functions. He participates in a variety  of open source  software development  projects and in other efforts to facilitate data sharing and improving adherence to standards among groups involved in information resource management in plant biology.