Rob Knight is the founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation, an Agile Center in the Jacobs School of Engineering with the School of Medicine and the Division of Biological Sciences as founding partners, and is a Professor in UC San Diego’s Departments of Pediatrics, Bioengineering and Computer Science & Engineering. He is the Wolfe Family Endowed Chair in Microbiome Research. His lab has produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline and UniFrac. He is co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project, the American Gut Project, and the company Biota, Inc., which uses DNA from microbes in the subsurface to guide oilfield decisions. His work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease, has enhanced our understanding of microbes in environments ranging from the oceans to the tundra, and made high-throughput sequencing techniques accessible to thousands of researchers around the world.
Institution:
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
Department:
Center for Microbiome Innovation; Pediatrics; Computer Science & Engineering