Rick is a biotech professional and microbial genomics specialist with deep expertise in next-generation sequencing and pathogen surveillance. He has led the development of scalable, cloud-native bioinformatics pipelines for clinical and public health applications, with a strong focus on antimicrobial resistance detection, outbreak investigation, and genomic epidemiology. His PhD research bridged computational biology and infectious disease, exploring novel methods for AMR gene detection. As Head of R&D at a biotechnology company, Rick directed cross-functional teams to integrate genomic technologies into laboratory and clinical workflows, ensuring regulatory compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA) and real-world utility. He also played a key role in establishing and delivering one of the first public-private contracts for pathogen genomics between a public hospital system and industry. Rick has authored over 20 publications and is passionate about translating genomics into actionable insights that improve public health outcomes and accelerate precision medicine.