Dr. Fouts is an Associate Professor at the Rockville Campus of the J. Craig Venter Instittue (JCVI) and is an Adjunct Research Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology and Diagnostic Sciences at the University of Maryland Dental School. Dr. Fouts has extensive experience in viral and bacteriophage genomics, bacterial genomics, comparative genomics, and metagenomics of bacterial and viral communities. Since joining Dr. Karen Nelson's group at TIGR/JCVI in 2001, Dr. Fouts has led several microbial sequencing projects, including animal, plant and human pathogens. Many of these projects were among the first to compare multiple strains. In addition to leading projects, Dr. Fouts has developed various software tools, including applications to perform multi-genome comparisons and heuristic software (Phage_Finder) to identify prophage regions in bacterial genomes. Dr. Fouts is currently leading the JCVI effort to sequence the human virome and reference viral and bacteriophage genomes under the Human Microbiome Project.
Dr. Fouts received his B.S. degree (1992) in Biology with honors from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) degrees in Microbiology from the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign Department of Microbiology. In 1997, he began postdoctoral work in Dr. Alan Collmer's lab at Cornell University.