Gerard Nasser

Bioinformatics PhD Candidate · UNC Charlotte

Gerard Nasser

Hi-C metagenomics · Antimicrobial resistance · Public health

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About

At the wet-lab / dry-lab boundary.

Bioinformatics PhD researcher at UNC Charlotte and affiliate of the NSF-funded PreMiEr (Precision Microbiome Engineering) Research Center. I work where computational biology meets public health — developing Hi-C metagenomic methods that link antimicrobial-resistance genes to their bacterial and plasmid hosts in built and wastewater environments, turning large-scale sequencing data into actionable insight on how resistance spreads and persists.

Researching

  • Hi-C metagenomics for resistance genes
  • AMR in built & wastewater environments
  • Linking plasmids to their bacterial hosts

Building

  • Reproducible bioinformatics pipelines
  • Cross-platform research desktop tools
  • Systematic-review & literature tooling

Background

  • Trained in microbiology & wet-lab work
  • Bacteriophage genomics (SEA-PHAGES)
  • Wet-lab ↔ dry-lab across the stack

Education

Education.

  1. Present

    Ph.D. Bioinformatics & Computational Biology

    UNC Charlotte

  2. 2019

    M.S. Biology

    Montclair State University

    Thesis: Effects of Differing Environmental Conditions on Bacteriophage Jenika

  3. 2015

    B.S. Biology (Minor: Psychology)

    Montclair State University

On GitHub

Everything I build is public.

Research pipelines, desktop tools, teaching material — it all lives on GitHub, in the open. Rather than list every repository here, my profile keeps the full, current picture (and a curated README that tells the story).

github.com/GerardNasser

Stand-alone applications

Tools you can actually run.

Finished, end-user software — desktop apps and CLI packages — built to install and use, not just read.

PRISMA-App

active

Desktop app for running PRISMA-2020 systematic reviews & meta-analyses — field-aware checklists, screening, extraction and risk-of-bias workflows, with pulls from PubMed, OpenAlex and Crossref.

  • Python
  • CustomTkinter
  • SQLAlchemy
  • Pydantic

Bioinformatic Scripting App

stable

Offline GUI that builds bioinformatics pipelines from a catalog of 60+ tools and exports them to Bash, Python, R, Nextflow, Snakemake or CWL — with SLURM/PBS/SGE/LSF scheduler support.

  • Python
  • PySide6
  • YAML

rarekit

early

Single-pass cumulative subsetting CLI for rarefaction workflows (FASTQ / FASTA / TSV / count tables) — holds a <200 MB memory ceiling regardless of input size, with a property-based test suite.

  • Python
  • NumPy

Inkstone

stable

Converts Word docs, notebooks, CSV/TSV, BibTeX, source code and more into clean, Obsidian-ready Markdown with YAML frontmatter. Ships as a desktop app and a Python library.

  • Python
  • CustomTkinter

OneLiner

stable

Minimal macOS utility that flattens messy multi-line text into one clean line, stripping invisible Unicode and collapsing whitespace.

  • Python
  • CustomTkinter

Research & career

Pipelines & paper code.

Repositories tied to research questions and academic work.

Research and paper-linked repositories will be highlighted here.

Side quests

For the fun of it.

Things I built outside of work — playgrounds, experiments, and the occasional D&D rabbit hole.

Alestur

stable

A GitHub Pages site for a homebrew D&D campaign — interactive character profiles, family tree and backstory. A playground for modern CSS.

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS

Publications

Genome submissions.

Complete bacteriophage genomes I co-authored and deposited to NCBI GenBank through SEA-PHAGES and related comparative-genomics work.

Conference talks & posters

Talks & posters.

Conference presentations and posters.

  1. 2026

    All Edges Lead to Nodes: Can Multiple Methods Lead to the Same Hi-C Contact Maps? talk

    ICCABS 2026 — 14th Int'l Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and Medical Sciences · Raleigh, NC

  2. 2026

    All Edges Lead to Nodes: Can Multiple Methods Lead to the Same Hi-C Contact Maps? poster

    ASM Microbe 2026 · Washington, D.C.

  3. 2017

    Isolation and Characterization of Novel Mycobacterium smegmatis Bacteriophage from New Jersey Soil Over the Past Six Years poster

    9th Annual SEA-PHAGES Symposium · Ashburn, VA

  4. 2017

    Development of Cluster-Specific Phage PCR Primers poster

    Montclair State University Student Research Symposium · Montclair, NJ

Teaching & outreach

Teaching & outreach.

Years in the lab classroom — and a commitment to bringing people from first principles to real bioinformatics workflows.

  1. Graduate Teaching Assistant

    Aug 2023 – Present

    Department of Bioinformatics & Genomics, UNC Charlotte

    Teaching assistant in the bioinformatics & genomics graduate program; also mentor two master's students through computational analysis and interpretation.

  2. Lead Graduate Assistant

    Aug 2019 – May 2021

    Department of Biology, Montclair State University

    Oversaw lab courses and a team of graduate TAs across the department, coordinated lab scheduling, and designed teaching techniques and instructional materials for undergraduate labs.

  3. Teaching Assistant

    Jan 2016 – May 2019

    Department of Biology, Montclair State University

    Taught undergraduate labs across Principles of Biology, Microbiology, and SEA-PHAGES; helped expand the SEA-PHAGES genome-sequencing curriculum in collaboration with HHMI.

Materials

Course

silico

A terminal course teaching programming and applied bioinformatics across 14 units — Python basics through FASTQ pipelines and a codon-usage capstone.

Honors & awards

Honors & awards.

  1. 2018

    Mario M. Casabona Future Scientists Program

    College of Science and Mathematics, Montclair State University

    Second place — one of two students selected from the Department of Biology (and one of ten from the College).

  2. 2017

    SEA-PHAGES Symposium Student Representative

    Howard Hughes Medical Institute

    One of two student representatives selected from Montclair State to present at the Annual HHMI SEA-PHAGES Symposium.

Contact

Let’s build something reproducible.

Open to collaboration on bioinformatics tools, genomics pipelines, and microbiome research.