Rob Knight is the founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and Professorof Pediatrics, Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering and Halıcıoğlu DataScience Institute at UC San Diego. He is the Wolfe Family Endowed Chair in MicrobiomeResearch at Rady Children’s. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in2024. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and ofthe American Academy of Microbiology. He was honored with the 2019 NIH Director’sPioneer Award for his microbiome research and received the 2017 Massry Prize, oftenconsidered a predictor of the Nobel. He is the author of “Follow Your Gut: The EnormousImpact of Tiny Microbes” (Simon & Schuster, 2015), coauthor of “Dirt is Good: TheAdvantage of Germs for Your Child’s Developing Immune System (St. Martin’s Press, 2017),and written over 800 scientific articles. He spoke at TED in 2014 which is viewed over 2.3million times. His lab has produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniquesthat enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline (citedover 50,000 times as of this writing) and UniFrac (cited over 12,000 times including its webinterface). He is co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project, the American Gut Project, andthe company Biota, Inc., which uses DNA from microbes in the subsurface to guide oilfielddecisions. His work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions including obesityand inflammatory bowel disease, has enhanced our understanding of microbes inenvironments ranging from the oceans to the tundra, and made high-throughputsequencing techniques accessible to thousands of researchers around the world. Dr.Knight can be followed on Twitter (@knightlabnews) or on his website http://knightlab.ucsd.edu/.