Roos’ career pivot to maximize impact

Shortly before the pandemic, David S. Roos closed the doors to his research lab. Unlike most lab closings, however, this has increased his group’s impact on science, as he has transitioned from studying parasitology to managing database resources full time.

Roos now leads a team of more than 50 staff, who work together like a well-oiled machine to keep multiple genomic databases up to date. For his body of work, Roos was named the winner of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s 2024 Alice and C.C. Wang Award in Molecular Parasitology.

David S. Roos

Roos’ group pioneered integrated databases resources, including the Eukaryotic Pathogen, Host & Vector Bioinformatics Resource Center VEuPathDB.org, the Orthology Database OrthoMCL.org and the Clinical & Epidemiology Resource ClinEpiDB.org. These tools help to make large-scale data sets findable and accessible for thousands of investigators worldwide, Roos said.

“I've been a scientist for a long time,” Roos said, “training scores of students and postdocs and publishing hundreds of papers — including some that have been cited thousands of times. However, our database resources are used by 50,000 unique users per month. I will never in my career publish a paper that is cited 50,000 times, let alone 50,000 times every month, year in and year out. It is particularly gratifying to see that these resources are equally useful to students and researchers all around the world.”

Though he’s had a wide impact on the parasitology field, Roos did not begin his scientific career studying parasites. “I think of myself as an evolutionary cell biologist,” he said.

Hoping to apply his skills to develop molecular tools enabling the genetic dissection of host–pathogen interactions, Roos became interested in molecular parasitology and was inspired by the enthusiastic support of C.C. Wang.

The Bay Area Parasitology meetings, often held in the Wang home, inspired Roos to establish his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 to work on parasites, despite never having previously published in this field.

“C.C. was somebody who not only provided great encouragement to me but also highlighted that it was possible to do something new,” Roos said.