Jon-Matthew Belton

Jon-Matthew Belton is the current Director of Workflow Development at Arima Genomics. Jon-Matthew has held this position since April of 2019. Prior to their current role, Jon-Matthew was a Research Scientist - NGS Development at Cibus US LLC from April 2016 to April 2019. In this role, they led problem solving and troubleshooting sessions on NGS development, contributed to the team achieving increasing capacity, reduced turnaround time, reduced cost, and higher quality, and computationally designed 36,000 NGS indices which increased throughput 9x for the high-throughput NGS genotyping platform.

In addition to their work at Cibus US LLC, Jon-Matthew has also been responsible for developing “Phasing” primers to increase diversity of NGS sequencing runs, which has resulted in an increase in throughput and a decrease in sequencing cost by 36%. Jon-Matthew has also developed an automated pipeline for NGS QC which has improved data quality and reduced hands on time of analysis.

Jon-Matthew’s experience with coordinating with key stakeholders to set targeted NGS assay specifications has resulted in him being able to define key development goals for the NGS group and standardize QC thresholds for assays. Jon-Matthew has also written a perl program to empirically determine read depth standards for NGS assays which has reduced sequencing cost by 50% while maintaining consistent quality.

Oversight of the development of an automated library prep pipeline increased throughput 4x and reduced prep failures. Jon-Matthew also oversaw the development of cloud-based (DNAnexus) analysis pipelines for high throughput genotyping analysis which increased genotyping throughput to >2000 samples with 1 hour of hands on time and established a salable infrastructure to support continued growth.

Lastly, Jon-Matthew created a Whole Genome Sequencing based quality control pipeline to screen for SV's. This method was then used to QC all products. Jon-Matthew built a perl program to generate simulated SV's to create reference sample to validate WGS QC pipeline and presented WGS analysis to senior management and the Scientific Advisory Board which resulted in buy-in from senior management on the value and efficacy of WGS QC analysis. The cloud based (DNAnexus) WGS analysis pipeline which they built decreased the hands on time to 1 min per sample and increased the WGS analysis through-put 10x.

Jon-Matthew Belton's educational career includes a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, as well as certification in Advanced Sequencing Technologies from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Jon-Matthew's undergraduate studies were in Biochemistry and Biotechnology at North Carolina State University, where they also minored in Genetics.

Jon-Matthew Belton reports to Sid Selvaraj, CEO. They work with Jeff Myers - Director, Finance, Pamela Bentley Mills - Director, Scientific Content & Communications, and Jeanette Kuhn - Director, Intellectual Property.