Vishal Nayak

Mr. Vishal Nayak is the Bioinformatics and Data Science Lead for the Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD) at the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, USA. Mr. Nayak brings bioinformatics and data science expertise to research carried out at the CDC in identifying emerging pathogens, improving vaccines, integrating genomic data with epidemiological surveillance; creating a service-oriented bioinformatics ecosystem by building reproducible, shareable, auditable genomic and metagenomic workflows ; providing scalable and powerful high-performance computing support; offering training and upskilling to an increasingly multidisciplinary scientific community at the United States’ premier public health agency. His research interests include metagenomic approaches to rare and novel pathogen detection, and machine learning techniques for investigation of outbreaks. He has more than 15 years of experience building scalable bioinformatics and systems biology platforms for multi-institution collaboration and solving complex data problems in biomedical research. He has built and enhanced bioinformatics resources such as VEuPathDB (https://veupathdb.org/) that serve millions of infectious disease researchers all over the world. He is passionate about data modernization in public health and integrating next-generation sequencing into modern infectious disease surveillance techniques. His publication record can be accessed at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WRR5rK66oXUC&hl=en. He enjoys Indian classical music, reading and learning new languages. While he speaks nine of them with varying degrees of fluency, he is currently trying his hand at learning Japanese.