Human Health Advancement

Key participants: Birthe Kjellerup (lead), Ryan Blaustein, Brantley Hall, Katharina Maisel, Margaret Slavin, and Hannah Zierden

Researchers in the Center study the impact of microbial communities on human health along a broad set of dimensions. Projects include research on human nutrition, food safety, biomimetic therapies, and wastewater surveillance.

Environmental and Agricultural Innovation

Key participants: Stephanie Yarwood (lead), Ryan Blaustein, Mostafa Ghanem, and Birthe Kjellerup

Research in this space focuses on the complex interactions, mediated by microbes, between agricultural and environmental systems. Some examples of projects include studies of soil microbial ecology and function, bioremediation of pollutants, the interaction between urban farming and food safety, and the protection of poultry from pathogens.

Technology Development

Key participants: Mihai Pop (lead), Bill Bentley, Brantley Hall, Reza Ghodssi, Huang Lin, Katharina Maisel, Sara Molinari, and Hannah Zierden

A unique feature of our center is the strong focus on the development of new technologies for extracting and analyzing data from microbial communities and for engineering microbial systems. This research includes the development of new sensing modalities, methods for engineering microbiome systems, and novel computational and statistical analysis methods.

Quantitative Microbial Dynamics and Ecosystems

Key participants: Joshua Weitz (lead), Huang Lin, and Mihai Pop

The way in which a microbiome is shaped by the complex interactions between its members, and by the interactions between the microbiome and its environment or host, cannot be effectively understood without the development of complex mathematical models of genome evolution and system dynamics. Some of the research performed in the center, for example, explores the way in which the complex interactions between phages (viruses that infect bacteria) and microbes can be used to treat antibiotic-resistant infections.