2017 Burroughs Wellcome Distinguished Lecture Presented by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Sciences

• Host: Ecology and Evolution Seminar Series
• Speaker: Dr. Robin D. Knight, University of California San Diego
• Seminar Title: Mapping Microbes on Scales from our Bodies to our Planet: From the Human Microbiome Project to the Earth Microbiome Project
• Date: January 12, 2017
• Time: 3:30-4:30 pm
• Location: David Clark Labs Room 101

Dr. Rob Knight is a professor of pediatrics and computer science & engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His computational and experimental approaches have led to rapid and cost-effective microbial DNA sequencing methods and data analysis platforms that help to understand similarities among microbial communities based on their evolutionary relationships. Dr. Knight has used informatics to show how maps of distinct microbes thriving in different parts of the human body change over time, how human-associated microbes can influence metabolic health, and how microbes can be used as timekeepers to help establish the time of death in forensic examinations. As you will hear in his presentation, he has also set out to catalog the diverse kinds of microbes found in ecosystems across the globe in an ambitious, collaborative effort called the Earth Microbiome Project. Dr. Knight’s book Follow Your Gut was published in April 2015. He was also recently presented with the Vilcek Foundation Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for his groundbreaking research on microbial communities and the development of computational tools that honed the analysis of microbial data.