ICG2013
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Rob Knight
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University of Colorado, U.S.
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Biography:
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| Rob Knight is an Associate Professor with the Biofrontiers Institute, in the departments of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Computer Science, and also part of Larry Hunter's Computational Biosciences Program. He did his bachelor's degree in biochemistry at the University of Otago in his native New Zealand, then did a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton on the evolution of the genetic code, before moving to CU Boulder to work as a postdoc with Mike Yarus to figure out how many random RNA molecules you need to look at before you find one with a particular genetic function. Since becoming a faculty member at CU in 2004, his lab has primarily focused on high-throughput methods for understanding microbial communities. He was chosen as one of 50 HHMI Early Career Scientists in 2009, is a Senior Editor at the ISME Journal (the leading microbial ecology journal), is a Board member of the Genomic Standards Consortium, and is heavily involved in the Human Microbiome Project and the Earth Microbiome Project, and has coauthored about 200 journal articles including four in Nature so far this year. His lab has been involved in linking microbes to obesity, in characterizing the baseline human microbiome, in revealing how skin bacteria drive attractiveness to mosquitoes, and in characterizing microbial patterns in environments ranging from the air to the deep subsurface. | |