Brandon Paul Kieft

Microbial communities are harnessed in a variety of anthropogenic processes, including waste-to-energy conversion, pollution cleanup, and biomanufacturing. Despite their widespread use, characteristics of complex microbial communities, including which populations are active and the functions they perform in concert with one another, are poorly understood from a predictive standpoint. In other words, we can generally identify who is there and the emergent (end-product) properties of the syste, but the collective activities of microbial populations is more difficult to measure. As a computational microbiologist, I use large datasets of DNA, RNA, and protein sequences to understand how microbes work synergistically (and antagonistically) to accomplish desirable industrial-scale biomass conversions such as renewable natural gas production from wastewater and breakdown of agricultural wastes to fertilizers and energy.