Steven G. Widen, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, University of Texas Medical Branch – Galveston, Texas, USA

Steven Widen is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB). He serves as the Director of the UTMB Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Core, which was established in September 2011 with the purchase of an Illumina HiSeq 1000. They have recently upgraded to a HiSeq 1500 and installed an Illumina MiniSeq and NextSeq550. He has spent most of his career utilizing molecular biology technology, but during his time as Director of Research at the biotech company Picoscript, he became involved in various aspects of computer programming as they developed laboratory automation, data handling, and integration with websites as part of our gene synthesis services. He agreed to assist the NGS core with all aspects of data handling and analysis. As a university core, they have become involved in many different types of projects and have to have the flexibility to handle each of them. A large part of their work has been developing pipelines and in-house software for identifying unknown viruses in many different kinds of samples, using de novo assembly techniques. They have also performed RNA-seq, ChIP-Seq, microRNA discovery and quantification, as well as de novo bacterial genome assembly and SNV analysis with exome-capture sequencing. For each of these he had to identify, install, and run the necessary programs, and deliver and explain the results to our customers.

Phone: (409) 772-6349
Email:
sgwiden@utmb.edu
Link:
https://bmb.utmb.edu/bios/widen