Rob Knight is founding director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and professor of pediatrics, bioengineering, and computer science and engineering at UC San Diego. Knight co-founded the American Gut Project, the Earth Microbiome Project, and Biota, Inc., which uses DNA from subsurface microbes to guide oilfield decisions. His work has linked microbes to multiple health conditions, enhanced understanding of microbes in many environments, and made high-throughput sequencing accessible to researchers around the world. At UC San Diego he started and runs the wastewater COVID-19 detection program and co-founded the EXCITE COVID-19 testing lab, which performs clinical tests and sequences viral genomes from wastewater and clinical samples. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Microbiology.
Previously
Knowledge about the human microbiome, those trillions of bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that inhabit our bodies, is revolutionizing medicine just as mapping the human g...