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. In this video Dr. Curtis Huttenhower will present a lecture titled, “Molecular Data and the Microbiome.”

Video Description
High-throughput sequencing has become one of many technologies that can be integrated to enable culture-independent studies of microbial communities. These include both environmental microbes, such as those that influence agriculture or water quality, as well as the human microbiome and its roles in health and disease. The multi'omic combination of amplicon sequencing, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and other functional molecular data is helping to bridge "parts lists" of these microbial residents with their phenotypic and environmental effects. This raises two current computational challenges: how to provide the most precise bioinformatic solutions describing microbial community systems biology, and what new applications of these integrated data types can be developed to improve population health? Dr. Huttenhower will discuss computational profiling methods for the human microbiome, which provide strain-specific microbial identification and metabolic reconstruction. In combination with microbiome-appropriate statistical tools, these can thus associate microbial features with health outcomes and covariates in human populations to better understand immune and inflammatory disease.

About the Speaker
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 was an analysis lead in the NIH Human Microbiome Project, the "HMP2," and currently leads the Human Microbiome Bioactives Resource. His lab focuses on computational methods for functional analysis of microbial communities, as well as microbiome epidemiology to link microbial community function to public health.

View slides from this lecture:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1U36NyMinKAm1R2rwgRb0fJUFVHbeYS9J

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