Congratulations to Nikos Kyrpides, JGI’s Prokaryote Super Program head, who was recently selected as the 2018 USFCC/J. Roger Porter Award recipient by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). This award recognizes outstanding efforts by a scientist who has demonstrated the importance of microbial biodiversity through sustained curatorial or stewardship activities for a major resource by the scientific community. Dr. Kyrpides will be recognized at the 2018 ASM Microbe Meeting in Atlanta, Ga.
In a 2014 Plos Biology article, Dr. Kyrpides and colleagues outlined the need to fund efforts to develop a comprehensive genomic catalog by sequencing the genome of at least one representative of every bacterial and archaeal species. For more than a decade, Dr. Kyrpides and his JGI colleagues have been working toward this goal, and in a June 2017 issue of Nature Biotechnology, they reported the release of 1,003 phylogenetically diverse bacterial and archaeal reference genomes—the single largest release to date as part of the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea.
This latest honor follows honorary doctorate conferred upon Dr. Kyrpides by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece earlier this year. He received the van Niel International Prize for Studies in Bacterial Systematics, an award conferred every three years by the University of Queensland in Australia, and is one of the JGI’s Highly Cited Researchers.