Dr. Huttenhower’s research focuses on computational biology at the intersection of microbial community function and human health. The human body carries some four pounds of microbes, primarily in the gut, and understanding their biomolecular functions, their influences on human hosts, and the metabolic and functional roles of microbial communities generally is one of the key areas of study enabled by high-throughput sequencing. First, computational methods are needed to advance functional metagenomics. How can we understand what a microbial community is doing, what small molecule metabolites or signaling mechanisms it’s employing, and how its function relates to its organismal composition? Second, our understanding of the human microbiome and its relationship with public health remains limited. Pathogens have been examined by centuries of microbiology and epidemiology, but we know relatively little about the transmission or heritability of the normal commensal microbiota, its carriage of pathogenic functionality, or its interaction with host immunity, environment, and genetics. Finally, more broadly, novel machine learning methodology is needed to leverage structured biological knowledge in high-dimensional genomic data analysis. The Huttenhower group works on a variety of computational methods for data mining in microbial communities, model organisms, pathogens, and the human genome.

In practice, this entails a combination of computational methods development for

Ben Fox is a senior Grants & Contracts Manager in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is the primary financial administrator of the Microbiome Collection Core.