ISCB Overton Prize Award Keynote
Curtis Huttenhower (KN02)
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge
United States
Presentation Title: Understanding microbial community function and the human microbiome in health and disease
Date/Time: Sunday, July 12th, 4:40 pm - 5:40 pm
Introduction by: Bonnie Berger
Abstract
Among many surprising insights, the genomic revolution has helped us to realize that we're never alone and, in fact, barely human. For most of our lives, we share our bodies with some ten times as many microbes as human cells. They are resident in our gut and on nearly every body surface, and they are a normal part of human health. Within the past decade, new "computational microscopes" have changed our understanding of the microbiome's importance in maintaining health and mitigating disease. I will discuss our computational work in moving from a "parts list" of microbial residents and their genes to understanding molecular function, metabolism, and interactions among microbes and with our own immune systems. Many open questions remain, however, regarding the ecological assembly driving colonization in the microbiome, its biomolecular functions, the causality of microbial community activity in various diseases, and how the microbiome can be intentionally modified to improve human health.
Biography
Dr. Curtis Huttenhower is an Associate Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and an Associate Member at the Broad Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in the lab of Dr. Olga Troyanskaya, where he also performed his postdoctoral research at the Lewis-Sigler Institute. He was an analysis lead in the NIH Human Microbiome Project and currently co-leads the "HMP2" Center for Characterizing the Gut Microbial Ecosystem in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. His lab focuses on computational methods for functional analysis of microbial communities. This includes systems biology reconstructions integrating metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, and other microbial community 'omics, the human microbiome in autoimmune disease such as IBD, and its potential as a diagnostic tool and point of therapeutic intervention.
Among many surprising insights, the genomic revolution has helped us to realize that we're never alone and, in fact, barely human. For most of our lives, we share our bodies with some ten times as many microbes as human cells. They are resident in our gut and on nearly every body surface, and they are a normal part of human health. Within the past decade, new "computational microscopes" have changed our understanding of the microbiome's importance in maintaining health and mitigating disease. I will discuss our computational work in moving from a "parts list" of microbial residents and their genes to understanding molecular function, metabolism, and interactions among microbes and with our own immune systems. Many open questions remain, however, regarding the ecological assembly driving colonization in the microbiome, its biomolecular functions, the causality of microbial community activity in various diseases, and how the microbiome can be intentionally modified to improve human health.