Research Areas:
Microbiome and Microbial Sciences

Prof. Rob Knight received his BS in Biochemistry from the University of Otago in 1996 and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2001. He then joined the University of Colorado at Boulder as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant. In 2004, he became an Assistant Professor of Computational Biosciences Program at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. In 2015, he joined the University of California, San Diego, where he is the Founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and Professor of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering. He is currently the Wolfe Family Endowed Chair in Microbiome Research at UC San Diego.

Prof. Knight’s research focuses on microbiome and microbial sciences, and computational and integrative biology. His team uses and develops state-of-the-art computational and experimental techniques to ask fundamental questions about the evolution of the composition of biomolecules, genomes, and communities in different ecosystems, including the complex microbial ecosystems of the human body. His lab has also produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline and UniFrac. He is the author of “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes” (Simon & Schuster, 2015), the co-author of “Dirt is Good: The Advantage of Germs for Your Child’s Developing Immune System” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), and has written over 900 scientific articles.

Prof. Knight’s outstanding contributions have been recognized through numerous prestigious awards, including the 2015 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, 2017 Massry Prize (with Jeffrey GORDON and Norman PACE), 2019 NIH Director's Pioneer Award. His election as a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology further attests to his esteemed status in the scientific community. Additionally, he is a Co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project, the American Gut Project, and Biota, Inc., a company that utilizes DNA from subsurface microbes to inform oilfield decisions.