Jean-François Pombert is an expert in computational genomics and sequencing technologies with more than 20 years of experience in the field. Pombert works on various bacteria, fungi, and plants with a focus on the evolution of human-infecting pathogens and associated diseases. The Pombert lab collaborates with research teams from several countries and since 2010 has authored or co-authored more than 30 genome-related papers in journals such as PNAS, Nature Communications, PLoS Genetics and Current Biology.
The Pombert lab’s research is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), by various scholarships to its student members, and by grants to its international collaborators. Pombert is a member of pre-proposal review panels for the Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR, France); an ad hoc adviser of the NIH-funded eukaryotic pathogen database MicrosporidiaDB; and an Academic Editor for PLoS ONE. Pombert is a distinguished researcher (IIT 2015) and lecturer (Université Laval, 2007), and he created the bioinformatics undergraduate degree at Illinois Tech launched in the Fall semester of 2015. Pombert and his team’s expertise in computational genomics is often solicited abroad, like the recent “Genomics Bootcamp” workshop that he and his Ph.D. students gave in Porto Alegre (Brazil, 2015).
Pombert joined the ranks of IIT’s biology department as assistant professor in August 2013. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Université Laval (Québec, Canada) in 2008, after which he headed to Vancouver (Canada) as a Louis-Berlinguet/Génome Québec Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia, specializing in high-throughput genome sequencing. Pombert’s diversified skillset includes biochemistry, microbiology, Perl programming, UNIX/Linux IT management, and building custom servers.
jpombert@iit.edu, 312.567.5745, https://www.pombertlab.org/, https://science.iit.edu/people/faculty/jean-francois-pombert