Yo! š
I’m Robert Petit (puh-teet, not pet-it), a “classically trained” bioinformatician. (haha yes I was called that because I was taught C and Perl back in the day) My work is focused on public health pathogens, mostly on the bacterial side, and workflow/tool development. If I had to describe my “bioinformatics philosophy”, it would say its “good-enough practical bioinformatics.” I’m in public health, so we need things to answer our questions today, because we have to move on to the next outbreak!
Like I mentioned, I’m classically trained, and have been a bioinformatician for 15+ years now. I’ve been primarily working as a bioinformatician with the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory (5+ years) in the great state of Wyoming. While the wind can be pretty annoying in Wyoming, I do enjoy living here and the group at WPHL makes it all the more worthwhile. At WPHL, my role includes building up the bioinformatic capacity, developing new tools to meet our needs, and facilitating bioinformatic training. With the support of WPHL, I have continued to develop Bactopia, an end-to-end bacterial genome analysis pipeline, more more than 5 years now.
I also act as a part-time bioinformatics consultant for various academic, government, and private organizations. So, if you are interested in collaborating or need assistance with bioinformatics projects, feel free to reach out!