The Expanding Role of Diagnostic Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory

Dr. John has a long association with academic medicine as a clinician, researcher, and teacher of internal medicine and infectious diseases. His major interest has centered around antibiotic resistance and antibiotic use and he has written extensively about those global problems. He has been a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he was Chief of Allergy, Immunology, and Infectious Diseases. In addition, the Ralph H. Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center employed Dr. John for more than 30 years. He continues to care for infected patients and patients with chronic Fatigue Syndrome at the Charleston VAMC. For almost 30 years he has been an associate editor of the Infectious Diseases Alert and is past editor-in-chief of the Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association. Currently Dr. John enjoys a part-time private practice with the Lowcountry Infectious Diseases & Infusion Center.  He lives in Charleston, S.C. with his wife Anne, not far from their three children: Chris, Matthew, and Meg. He can be reached at jfjohn44@aol.com.

Dr. Schmidt’s research focuses on controlling acquisition of hospital-acquired Infections, pandemic flu preparations & disaster preparedness, and bacterial pathogenesis. Currently, he is developing a series of comprehensive multi-center clinical trials that will evaluate the world’s first continuously active and non-leaching antimicrobial gloves for use in healthcare in order to assess their utility in limiting the acquisition of healthcare associated infections (HAI). This work directly compliments his efforts in leading an inter-institutional/ interdisciplinary team of professionals investigating the role that microbes associated with objects present in clinical environments play related to HAI. His laboratory has expertise in the molecular characterization of complex biofilms, principally those associated with mixed microbial communities including those of medical and dental significance. Recent work has focused on the relationship between the population distribution of the human intestinal microbiome and the genesis of colorectal cancer, type II diabetes, NASH and necrotizing ulcerative colitis in a neonatal population. He serves on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM) and the International Editorial Board for Infection Prevention in Practice (IPIP) for the Healthcare Infection Society of England. He is the immediate past chair of the Branch Organization Committee for the American Society for Microbiology. He presently serves as regular contributor to the internationally recognized podcast This Week In Microbiology.

1985-1989 Postdoctoral Fellowship, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Research Associate in the laboratory of Donald B. Oliver. Education

1985 Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington

1981 MA, Indiana University, Bloomington

1978, BS University of Illinois, Chicago