It is my pleasure to announce that the user of the month for December 2012 is Kurt LaButti from the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.
Kurt has been in the genomics industry since 2001. He started at what is now the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT working on the human genome. He performed closure on chromosomes 17 and 11. He then transitioned into bioinformatics and assembly analysis, working primarily on fungi and virus genomes. At the Joint Genome Institute, he assembles and analyzes data from the DOE community, sequencing relevant organisms. His group handles microbes, metagenomes, fungi, and other interesting projects.