Granger Sutton

Granger Sutton is Director of Bioinformatics Research at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JVCI). Sutton is a member of the CAMERA Steering Committee. He completed a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1982 at the Universtity of Maryland and an M.S. in Computer Engineering in 1983 at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland in 1992 under the guidance of Professor James Reggia. His thesis work involved learning in neural networks. Following his degree, he joined The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), where he worked on new algorithms for the clustering and alignment of proteins and expressed sequence tags (ESTs). The techniques he developed found new application in the assembly of whole-genome shotgun data. Sutton's software, the TIGR Assembler, was used, in 1995, to successfully assemble the Haemophilus influenzae genome.

In 1998, Sutton moved from TIGR to Celera Genomics and, along with Gene Myers, led the team that developed a whole-genome assembly (WGA) pipeline for large complex genomes. Despite successful assembly of the drosophila and human genomes by the Celera team, WGA remained controversial for a time. However, shortly after Celera produced the first high-quality mouse genome sequence, the genome sequencing community largely adopted Celera's methodology. As Director in the Informatics Research group, Sutton also led efforts at Celera in Comparative Genomics. In 2004, Granger joined the Bioinformatics Research team where he is engaged in a variety of research efforts, including using "whole environment" shotgun DNA sequencing to characterize the microbial make-up of complex environments. This work has evolved to include analysis of the entire known protein space using a novel clustering approach. In 2004, Sutton joined the Editorial Board of the journal Genome Research and, in 2005, he became a member of the External Advisory Board of the Computer Science department at George Washington University.