NLM Selects Dr. Richard H. Scheuermann as Scientific Director for the National Library of Medicine
Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has named Richard H. Scheuermann, PhD, as NLM’s new Scientific Director following a nationwide search. Dr. Scheuermann is currently the La Jolla campus director at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He is expected to begin his role as NLM Scientific Director on September 10, 2023.
“NLM is embarking on a bold new direction to optimize NLM’s vibrant Intramural Research Program and we look forward to welcoming Dr. Scheuermann to the NLM leadership team and working with him to enhance and leverage NLM’s intramural research resources and to focus on high-priority scientific objectives,” said Dr. Brennan. “I also want to express my sincerest gratitude to Dr. Valerie Florance for serving as NLM’s Acting Scientific Director for nearly three years.”
Dr. Scheuermann brings vast expertise in informatics, data science, and computational methods coupled with experience in immunology and infectious diseases to his new role at NLM. As Scientific Director, he will be responsible for setting scientific priorities and developing a comprehensive vision for NLM’s broad Intramural Research Program, which includes components housed in both the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications and the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Dr. Scheuermann will help guide NLM’s ongoing efforts to align NLM research priorities with the NLM Strategic Plan, the research priorities of NIH, and the broader biomedical research community.
In addition to serving as the La Jolla campus director at JCVI, Dr. Scheuermann also served as the Director of Informatics at JCVI, an adjunct professor of pathology at the University of California, San Diego, and in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.
During his career, Dr. Scheuermann has applied his deep knowledge in molecular immunology and infectious disease toward the development of novel computational data mining methods and knowledge representation approaches, including the development of biomedical ontologies and their use in data mining, novel methods for the analysis of gene expression, protein network and flow cytometry data, and novel comparative genomics methods. These computational methods have been made available through several public database and analysis resources, including the Influenza Research Database (IRD), the Virus Pathogen Resource (ViPR), the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC), and the Immunology Database and Analysis Portal (ImmPort) supported by the NIH. More recently, Dr. Scheuermann has focused on the development of novel artificial intelligence approaches for interpreting single cell genomics data of the human immune and nervous systems.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Life Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.