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CHAIR BIOS: SPADA CHAIR
MATTHEW DAVENPORT, PhD
PROGRAM MANAGER, BIOSCIENCES AND INFORMATICS
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY
Chair, AOAC Stakeholder Panel on Agent Detection Assays
Matt is a Program Manager in Biosciences and Informatics at the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) to include projects in personalized genomics, the
Microbiome, and functional biology. Matt also works in the areas of human performance and
austere medicine with military communities. Prior to JHU/APL, Matt was a Program Manager in
the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) where he
established the DHS Public Safety Actionable Assay (PSAA) program and the Stakeholder Panel
for Agent Detection Assays (SPADA) to develop voluntary consensus standards for the
validation of biothreat detection technologies used by first responders and private‐sector end
users. In addition to the PSAA program, Matt coordinated a number of bioinformatics efforts
including: the development of new databases and software to identify signatures that can be
used to specifically detect biothreat agents; sequencing strains of biothreats and their genetic
near‐neighbors; and application of next generation sequencing to biothreat detection. He also
served on numerous interagency committees and co‐chaired a working group under the
National Science and Technology Council that produced
A National Strategy for CBRNE
Standards
.
Matt joined DHS S&T as a Science and Technology Policy Fellow from the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) where he worked in the same areas of biological
countermeasures. Prior to DHS, he was a postdoctoral fellow at both The Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine and the Memorial Sloan‐Kettering Cancer Center studying the
biochemical mechanisms that control replication of the human genome and the repair of
genome when it becomes damaged. Matt earned his doctorate from the Department of
Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.S. in
microbiology from North Carolina State University.