Dr. Ford Combs is the Senior Bioinformatics Engineer at Biotia, where he develops bioinformatics pipelines that support clinicians and researchers in infectious disease diagnostics. Working with a range of sequencing data types and sources, he designs and deploys end-to-end workflows for pathogen detection, strain identification, outbreak analysis, and clinical diagnostics.

At George Mason University, Ford earned his MS and PhD focusing on protein structure analysis, exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to probe novel topological feature spaces. His work earned several departmental honors, including Best Master's Thesis and awards for both oral and digital presentation. During his graduate studies, he developed a passion for teaching while working as a teaching assistant for introductory biology lab, winning the Mason Core Award and Dean's Graduate Award for excellence in teaching. While finishing his PhD, he joined the bioinformatics team at the American Type Culture Collection, where he developed and maintained internal research and authentication pipelines and supported the ATCC Genome Portal, a high-quality, authenticated database of annotated microbial genomes. He continues to teach as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Bioinformatics at the University of Maryland Global Campus.

What makes Ford's path distinctive is where it began. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in Music, then spent a year in Spain studying flamenco guitar at the Conservatori del Liceu in Barcelona. Throughout, a parallel fascination with science and technology found expression in computer-generated algorithmic music and molecular-vibration-based protein music, eventually leading him to bioinformatics and computational biology. He finds that background invaluable for creative problem solving and bringing a different perspective to complex challenges.