The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced the appointment of Dr. Richard H. Scheuermann, PhD, as its new Scientific Director. This appointment comes after an extensive nationwide search to find a leader who can guide the NLM's Intramural Research Program into the future. Dr. Scheuermann, currently serving as the La Jolla campus director at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), assumed his new role on September 10, 2023.
With an impressive background in informatics, data science, and computational methods, combined with expertise in immunology and infectious diseases, Dr. Scheuermann brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his position at NLM. As the Scientific Director, he will be entrusted with the responsibility of defining scientific priorities and crafting a comprehensive vision for NLM's expansive Intramural Research Program. This program encompasses facets housed within both the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications and the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Dr. Scheuermann's role will play a pivotal part in aligning NLM's research objectives with the NLM Strategic Plan, the research initiatives of NIH, and the broader biomedical research community.
Beyond his role as the La Jolla campus director at JCVI, Dr. Scheuermann has held positions as the Director of Informatics at JCVI, an adjunct professor of pathology at the University of California, San Diego, and a contributor to the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.
Throughout his illustrious career, Dr. Scheuermann has leveraged his profound knowledge of molecular immunology and infectious diseases to advance novel computational data mining methods and knowledge representation techniques. This includes the development of biomedical ontologies and their application in data mining, pioneering methods for analyzing gene expression, protein network, and flow cytometry data, as well as innovative comparative genomics approaches. These computational tools have been made accessible through various public databases and analysis resources, including the Influenza Research Database (IRD), the Virus Pathogen Resource (ViPR), the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC), and the Immunology Database and Analysis Portal (ImmPort), all supported by the NIH. In recent years, Dr. Scheuermann has concentrated his efforts on pioneering artificial intelligence solutions for interpreting single-cell genomics data related to the human immune and nervous systems.
The appointment of Dr. Richard H. Scheuermann to the position of Scientific Director at NLM marks an exciting development for the institution. His vast expertise and forward-looking vision are poised to advance NLM's contributions to the field of biomedical research, ensuring that it remains at the forefront of scientific discovery and innovation.
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