Marcus Sherman

Marcus D. Sherman joined the Roux Institute as an assistant teaching professor of bioinformatics in August ‘22.

Sherman earned a BS in biology with biomedical emphasis from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and his PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Michigan. Sherman’s early research was in the structural variation of the human genome and genomics tool development. During his research, Sherman authored a tool called BAMnostic aimed at making genomic data analysis more accessible across multiple operating systems. However, Sherman found his passion in teaching and pivoted his dissertation work toward the study of the education of bioinformatics instead. Sherman’s research was divided between identifying bioinformatic threshold concepts and developing and operationalizing the Pedagogy of Interdisciplinary Science Education (POISE) training program. Additionally, Sherman is a strong ambassador for the Python programming language, both a contributor to the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem and a staff member for the annual Python programming language conference: PyCon.

Sherman uses photography as an outlet and is found regularly in the streets, waters, and mountains of the Downeast taking in all that Maine has to offer.

Academic Overview

• BINF6308/6309/6310: Bioinformatics Methods
• BINF6400: Genomics in Bioinformatics
• BINF6430: Transcriptomics in Bioinformatics
• CS5001: Intensive Foundations of Computer Science Course Charter

Areas of Expertise

• Andragogy & Pedagogy
• Python Programming
• Bioinformatics