Sergei Pond, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the UCSD School of Medicine. He has a doctoral degree in applied mathematics and has been developing open-source bioinformatics software for several years. He leads a research group in viral evolution in the Center for AIDS Research at UCSD. His phylogenetic tree software has been used by hundreds of investigators around the world, and his research involves the development of tools for subtracting microbial reads from massively parallel sequencing human samples.