Director

Dr. Bonnie Hurwitz is the Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center (BRC) and Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, appointed in August 2025. A leading figure in computational biology and environmental genomics, she brings more than 25 years of experience spanning academia, industry, and large-scale cyberinfrastructure development to her role stewarding the BRC’s research, education, and industry partnerships within the Research Triangle Park ecosystem. She earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona, where her doctoral work examined viral community dynamics in the ocean, and holds a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dr. Hurwitz’s research sits at the intersection of microbiome analytics, viral ecology, and cyberinfrastructure. She is best known for developing platforms and computational methods that make large-scale microbial and viral ‘omics data findable, accessible, and analytically tractable — most notably through Planet Microbe, iMicrobe, and her ongoing iVirus project, which is advancing AI-driven viral ecology through high-performance computing. Her lab applies these tools across marine ecosystems, gut microbiome dynamics in cardiovascular disease, wound microbiome characterization, and the development of FAIR data standards for environmental genomics. She holds four patents spanning metagenomics, clinical microbiology, and molecular diagnostics.

A nationally recognized leader in her field, Dr. Hurwitz is an elected Board Member of the International Genomic Standards Consortium, a Champion for the National Microbiome Data Collaborative, and an editor at GigaScience and iScience (Cell Press). Her work has been funded by NSF, NIH, the Department of Energy, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. She has also brought a distinctive industry perspective to her academic leadership, having served as an Amazon Scholar at AWS and Visiting Scholar at Hewlett Packard Enterprises.

Assistant Director

Dr. Louis-Marie Bobay serves as Assistant Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University. Appointed in May 2026, he brings a rich interdisciplinary background spanning genomics, microbiology, evolutionary biology, and bioinformatics to research endeavors at the BRC.

Dr. Bobay earned his PhD at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, where he investigated the evolution of prophages in bacteria and built foundational expertise in microbial evolution, population genetics, and bioinformatics. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, he turned his focus to recombination in bacteria, developing novel approaches that leverage recombination patterns to define species boundaries in microbial populations. He subsequently joined the University of North Carolina Greensboro as an Assistant Professor before moving to NC State.

His current research program at NCSU is broad and methodologically ambitious. He is developing new computational frameworks for inferring recombination rates in bacteria using Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), while leading projects on adaptive evolution in microbes, gene diversity dynamics, and the population-level processes driving speciation in microbial systems.