Microbe Miner: A Profile of Rob Knight

Developing computational tools to analyze the reams of microbial sequencing data his lab generates, the UC San Diego microbiologist is a pioneer of microbiome research.

Written byAnna Azvolinsky

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Not long after Rob Knight started his first lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2004, one of his graduate students, Catherine Lozupone, approached him and asked to make a change. Knight’s lab was studying an appendage called the Type III secretion system, which some Gram-negative bacteria use to detect and infect eukaryotes. Lozupone told Knight she didn’t want to study the secretion system any more. Instead, she said, she wanted to study microbial diversity using computational methods.

“We had had a conversation about this when she first joined the lab, and I had said to her, ‘You know Cathy, I don’t want to stop you from following your dreams, but at the same time, Type III secretions is a hot area of science. And as far as the microbial diversity stuff, even MacArthur genius award winner and National Academy member Norman Pace can’t ...

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Meet the Author

Anna Azvolinsky
Anna Azvolinsky received a PhD in molecular biology in November 2008 from Princeton University. Her graduate research focused on a genome-wide analyses of genomic integrity and DNA replication. She did a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and then left academia to pursue science writing. She has been a freelance science writer since 2012, based in New York City.
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