Our goal is to understand and engineer diverse microbial communities, including the human microbiome. However, this is a challenging prospect because most microbial communities contain large numbers of evolving and interacting species, which makes them complex systems with many moving parts. We break down this complexity by combining ecological and evolutionary theory with a diverse set of methods from microbiology. For example, we discovered that one can predict which sets of human gut bacteria will inhibit an incoming pathogen based solely on the ecology of nutrient competition.

Image of the mammalian gut microbiome by Carolina Tropini, UBC