Owen R. White, PhD

University of Massachusetts, BS, Biotechnology, 1985
New Mexico State University, PhD, Molecular Biology, 1992
Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), Postdoctoral Fellow, Genome Informatics, 1994

Dr. White is an internationally recognized expert in bioinformatics with more than 15 years of experience. At the University of Maryland School of Medicine, he leads a team of 25 scientists and engineers at the Institute for Genome Sciences developing production-level pipelines, databases, and tools for automated and manual analysis of genomic and metagenomic data.

Dr. White and his group design socio-technical frameworks that enable large, multi-institutional research collaborations through consensus governance, standardized metadata, and coordinated data processing and sharing. Their work supports robust data ingestion, curation, harmonization, and uniform processing to create FAIR, broadly accessible multi-omic resources. The group also develops visualization and analytical tools, facilitates consortium-wide publications, and expands community access to complex biomedical datasets through outreach and collaboration.

For 10 years, Dr. White served as PI for two NIH-funded data centers supporting the Human Microbiome Project and the Integrative Human Microbiome Project, producing more than 50,000 heterogeneous datasets totaling approximately 10 terabytes of multi-omic data. He also played a leadership role in establishing the Common Fund Data Ecosystem, serving as lead for the CFDE Coordinating Center, which federated data across 12 NIH Data Coordination Centers.

His team established and maintains the Neuroscience Multi-Omic Data Archive (NeMO) for the BRAIN Initiative, a large-scale resource containing more than 2.6 PB of genomic data across over 8.2 million files spanning bulk and single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic, and methylation assays.

Dr. White is also a leader in the development of the Consortium Organization and Data Collaboration Center for the Human Virome Program, building cloud-enabled infrastructure for deposition, harmonization, analysis, and dissemination of multi-omic datasets from hundreds of thousands of samples, along with standardized workflows and open-source tools to support integrative viral-host research.

Genomic, transcriptomic, multi-omic, data management, metadata, standards, ontologies, cloud systems.

Huttenhower C, Knight R, Brown CT, Caporaso JG, Clemente JC, Gevers D, Franzosa EA, Kelley ST, Knights D, Ley RE, Mahurkar A, Ravel J, Scientists for Advancement of Microbiome R, White O. Advancing the microbiome research community. Cell. 2014;159(2):227-30. PMCID: PMC4221798 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.09.022.

Gevers D, Knight R, Petrosino JF, Huang K, McGuire AL, Birren BW, Nelson KE, White O, Methe BA, Huttenhower C. The Human Microbiome Project: a community resource for the healthy human microbiome. PLoS biology. 2012;10(8):e1001377. PMCID: PMC3419203 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001377.

The Integrative Human Microbiome Project: dynamic analysis of microbiome-host omics profiles during periods of human health and disease. Cell host & microbe. 2014;16(3):276-89. PMCID: PMC5109542 DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2014.08.014.

Fertig, E., Bergman, D. et al. "Virtual cells for predictive immunotherapy." Nature Biotechnology, April 14, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41587-025-02583-2
Fertig, E., Lvovs, D., Mahurkar, A., White, O. "Ethical and reproducible data sharing in computational oncology." Cell Reports Medicine, April 15, 2025.