Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Justin Zook (Fed)

Co-Leader, Biomarker and Genomic Sciences Group

Dr. Justin Zook is co-leading the Genome in a Bottle Consortium’s work developing authoritatively characterized human genomes to benchmark sequencing methods. He developed methods to compare and integrate whole genome DNA sequencing data from multiple platforms and sequencing runs to characterize the first whole human genome Reference Materials.  He leads the GIAB Analysis Team work combining short, linked, and long read sequencing technologies to characterize structural variation and challenging regions of the genome, and recently started the Cancer GIAB project to extensively characterize a broadly-consented tumor/normal pair.  He co-led the variants team in the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium demonstrating the utility of the first complete human genome. He was an Informatics Representative to the Association for Molecular Pathology Clinical Practice Committee, and he chaired the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health Benchmarking Team, which published best practices for benchmarking genome sequencing results in 2019. He has co-authored >60 papers, including in Science, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, JAMA, and Cell Genomics, and he wrote a blog about the inspiration for his NIST work.  

Research Opportunities

NIST-NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship: 2-year fellowship at NIST, US citizens only, ~$75,000 salary plus benefits, relocation expenses included, application deadlines are Feb. 1 and Aug. 1, requires 10 page research proposal, contact me if interested in writing a proposal on a bioinformatics genomics research project. We have opportunities posted for metrology in Cancer GenomicsDiploid AssemblyEpigenomics and TranscriptomicsBiological Data Science/Machine Learning, and Precision Medicine.

For additional job opportunities in genome bioinformatics, including for non-US citizens, contact me at my email address in the panel to the right.

Awards

Department of Commerce Gold and Silver Awards
Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
NIST Judson C. French Award
Council for Chemical Research Rising Star Award
NIST/NRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Publications

Cybersecurity of Genomic Data

Author(s)
Ronald Pulivarti, Natalia Martin, Frederick R. Byers, Justin Wagner, Justin Zook, Samantha Maragh, Jennifer McDaniel, Kevin Wilson, Martin Wojtyniak, Brett Kreider, Ann-Marie France, Sallie Edwards, Tommy Morris, Jared Sheldon, Scott Ross, Phillip Whitlow
Genomic data has enabled the rapid growth of the U.S. bioeconomy and is valuable to the individual, industry, and government because it has multiple intrinsic

The complete sequence of a human Y chromosome

Author(s)
Arang Rhie, Sergey Nurk, Monika Cechova, Savannah Hoyt, Dylan Taylor, Nathanael David Olson, Justin Zook, Adam Phillippy
The human Y chromosome has been notoriously difficult to sequence and assemble because of its complex repeat structure that includes long palindromes, tandem

A Draft Human Pangenome Reference

Author(s)
Wen-Wei Liao, Mobin Asri, Jana Ebler, Jennifer McDaniel, Nathanael David Olson, Justin Wagner, Justin Zook, Erik Garrison, Tobias Marschall, Ira Hall, Heng Li, Benedict Paten
Here the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium presents a first draft of the human pangenome reference. The pangenome contains 47 phased, diploid assemblies from
Created September 24, 2019, Updated April 16, 2024