His research has been sponsored by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Ohio Plant Biotechnology Consortium, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Ohio Board of Regents. He is the principal investigator of the $9M Bioinformatics Program of the Ohio Board of Regents. Dr. Welch is founder and co-chair of the ISMB Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics for Regulatory Genomics (BioRegSIG).

Research Interests: Bioinformatics, Computational regulatory genomics, Machine learning, High performance computing