The sequencing is rarely where it breaks.

It breaks earlier, in a study designed for a laboratory that does not exist in your building. Or it breaks later, once the data exists, sits on a hard drive, and the only people who can analyse it are three time zones away and listed ahead of you on the paper.

I am a microbiologist. AMR, genomic epidemiology, One Health. I run a research group in Cameroon and I have spent my career designing work that has to survive real conditions: real budgets, real supply chains, real bandwidth, real staff turnover. Not the version that works in the methods section.

So when we talk, we are talking as peers. I will read your design the way a reviewer will, and also the way a lab technician will at 6am when the reagent has not arrived.


BOOK ME IF YOU ARE CARRYING ONE OF THESE

You are about to commit to a study design. Bring it before you collect anything. An hour now is worth more than a year of data you cannot use.

You have sequences and no analysis. They have been sitting there for months. We work out what they can answer, what they cannot, and what your team can run without outside help.

Your surveillance publishes but changes nothing. Design that produces papers and design that produces decisions are not the same design. We look at where yours stops.

You are building AMR or One Health surveillance from scratch. Sampling strategy, site selection, which compartments, which isolates, and what you will do with the output before you generate it.

Your bioinformatics depends entirely on a partner abroad. That is a dependency, not a collaboration. We map what your team can realistically own, and the shortest path to owning it.

You need a second opinion before you commit. A protocol, a methods section, an interpretation, a phylogeny you are not sure about. Sometimes the useful answer is that it is fine.


HOW I WORK

Design first. Most of the value in a genomics project is decided before a single sample is taken. If you come to me at the analysis stage, I will help, but I will also tell you what an earlier conversation would have saved you.

Feasible on your infrastructure. Pipelines that run on the compute and connectivity you have, not on an idealised cluster. There is no point recommending a tool your team cannot maintain.

Transfer, not dependency. Anything I do for you, I would rather show your team how to do. That is not generosity, it is the only version of capacity that lasts.

In French or in English. Including the bioinformatics. Francophone African teams are routinely trained in a language that adds a second obstacle to a hard subject.


WHAT I DO NOT DO

I do not run your sequencing, and I am not a substitute for a service provider or a core facility.

I do not ghostwrite papers.

I will tell you if your question does not need genomics. Sometimes it does not, and the honest answer saves you a grant.

Come with something concrete. A draft protocol, a dataset, a methods section, a design you are weighing. The hour is worth far more with material in front of us than with a general conversation about surveillance.