Dr. Fouts has extensive experience in viral and bacteriophage genomics, bacterial genomics, comparative genomics, and metagenomics of bacterial and viral communities.
Since joining Dr. Karen Nelson's group at TIGR/JCVI in 2001, Dr. Fouts has led several microbial sequencing projects, including animal, plant and human pathogens. Many of these projects were among the first to compare multiple strains. In addition to leading projects, Dr. Fouts has developed various software tools, including applications to perform multi-genome comparisons and heuristic software (Phage Finder) to identify prophage regions in bacterial genomes. He is currently leading the effort to sequence the human virome and reference viral and bacteriophage genomes as part of the NIH sponsored, Human Microbiome Project.