Kameswara Rao Kottapalli, Ph.D

Manager Genomics and Bioinformatics Core, Center for Biotechnology and Genomics, Adjunct Graduate Faculty, Department of Biology

Dr. Rao is currently a Research Associate Professor and serving as the Manager for the Genomics and Bioinformatics core in the Center for Biotechnology and Genomics. He has more than 15 years of experience in genomics and functional genomics with expertise in Genotyping, Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics. He has been leading the Next-Gen Genomics core facility since 2011 and has expertise in RNA-Sequencing, whole genome sequencing, small RNA-sequencing, ChIP-sequencing, and 16s metagenomics sequencing on both MiSeq and HiSeq 2500 instruments. He has handled Bioinformatics projects for more than 5 years and is serving as a Bioinformaticist for both Texas Tech University and TTU-Health Sciences Center.
He teaches graduate courses, Gene Expression Analysis (BTEC 5312), Bioinformatics: Principles, Methods and Applications (BTEC 5001-04), and Introduction to High Performance Computing for Biotechnology (BTEC 5001-04). He frequently guest lectures in various TTU departments and has presented invited talks at the Rawls Business School, The Institute of Environmental and Human Health, and the Department of Computer Sciences.
He has successfully obtained federal grants (USDA-AFRI, Borlaug-USDA International award, NSF-MRI, USDA Ogallala Aquifer Initiative) with a major focus on bioinformatics and functional genomics. He has more than 25 publications in peer-reviewed journals and was awarded the International Generation Challenge Program Postdoctoral Fellow in 2005-06. He is currently supervising several M.S. students and serving on Ph.D. student committees with a research focus on Next-gen genomics and bioinformatics.
He is a member of the Association for Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF), American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the TTU Transdisciplinary Academy, the Obesity Research Cluster, and the Big Data Cluster of Texas Tech University.