I'll be @dukemedschool.bsky.social next week presenting my research: “Ancient Partnerships, Modern Insights: Tracing the Assembly, Transmission, and Evolution of Mammalian Gut Microbes”. sites.duke.edu/microbiome/2... Come say Hi! @duke-university.bsky.social #microbiome

Poster deadline for the Keystone Microbiome Meeting in Banff is December 30th www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/... Will be a great meeting focused on human microbiomes, spanning basic, mechanistic, and applied. Organized by myself, @amibhatt.bsky.social , and Harry Sokol. Join us!

Proud to have contributed to this important work! STREAMS guidelines: standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated #microbiome studies. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natmicrobiol.nature.com

Ok; mim (github.com/COMBINE-lab/...) preprint submitted! Excited for folks to see it and share thoughts. The key takeaway; mim allows the quick, one-time, building of a small auxiliary index that then allows scaling gzipped FASTQ parsing linearly in # of threads. 1/2

If anyone happens to be around UNC Chapel Hill this week, I'll be speaking on Tuesday: www.med.unc.edu/cgibd/event/... @microbiomeunc.bsky.social #microbiome

Excited to share a new preprint w/ the Sonnenberg lab, led by Matt Carter, @zzzhiru.bsky.social & @mattolm.bsky.social. We analyzed the microbiomes of two non-industrialized populations from opposite sides of the globe to try to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of our gut microbiota.

Check out this incredible analysis! Prehistoric Global Migration of Vanishing Gut Microbes With Humans www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

I am seeking a postdoc for my group at UCLA. We work at the intersection of population genetics x microbiome (garud.eeb.ucla.edu). If interested, please message me!

Looks like it'll be a good one!

Excited to share the Compendium Manager -- our new tool for scaling bioinformatics pipelines! Launch thousands of analyses, track progress, and maintain reproducibility. Developed by @richabdill.com. Check it out: arxiv.org/abs/2505.11385

#NatureMicroPicks Microbial integrons in focus 🦠🧬 Two studies showing microbial integrons encoding phage defense systems #MicroSky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A very open-ended question: Has anyone developed a lab policy for for AI use in their biomedical research that they'd be willing to share? Have people even thought about defining what should be allowed/encouraged, and what should be outright banned? Please share with anyone who might have ideas.

🔬 New Perspective in mBio (@asm.org)! We call for a shift from disease surveillance to microbial stewardship, and highlight testable, cross-system hypotheses to unravel central rules of microbial life–spanning multiple scales, taxa, and environments. 🦠🌎 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

From 2 of my favorite scientists: “We are deeply concerned about the current funding climate. When we think about new professors or postdocs starting their own labs, we worry that funding challenges could easily result in losing a generation of talented scientists.” news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species? How many cells transmit when a strain is shared? Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable? We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper. 🧵[1/10]

This is exciting! Top reporting on Science, Biotech, Health Policy, and Public Health news. Wake Forest University School of Medicine affiliates can access @statnews.com for the next 2 weeks! Visit www.statnews.com/register/ & enter a valid @wakehealth.edu email address @wakeforest.bsky.social

WOW -- this is awesome:

"...creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organized."

Are Microbiomes Contagious? Check out this awesome video on the social #microbiome. asm.org/Videos/Are-M... @asm.org

This is such a cool finding...

I’m excited to share that I’ll be starting a new position as an Assistant Professor at @wakeforest.bsky.social School of Medicine! The Sprockett Lab will focus on understanding the assembly, transmission, and evolution of the microbiome, and how these forces impact host health and physiology.

Our review is out in Nature Reviews Genetics! rdcu.be/d5AY2 We show how phylogeny-based methods can resolve the problem of non-independence in genomic datasets. These methods must be considered an essential part of the comparative genomics toolkit. @lauriebelch.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social

More cool strain-level findings from @mattolm.bsky.social -- kind of unbelievable that this hadn't been done yet! "Metagenomic immunoglobulin sequencing reveals IgA coating of microbial strains in the healthy human gut" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I have a New Years Day tradition of closing all of the open tabs/windows on my phone and computer, and then clearing out all of the old emails and papers that I've been meaning to read. It's a small but meaningful way to wipe the slate clean, and start the new year feeling mentally refreshed.

MICROBIOME DATA ANALYSIS WORKSHOP AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY Nov 6th, 2023 10AM – noon, Corson-Mudd Hall, Room A409 Topics Include: - Standardized Workflows for Metagenomic Analysis - Metadata Management - F.A.I.R. Data Use Pre-Register Here: tinyurl.com/cornellmicrobiome #microsky 🦠 🧫

As stressful and uncertain as it is to be on the faculty job market, I have REALLY been enjoying having the opportunity to read dozens upon dozens of departmental and lab websites (not to mention papers I've overlooked ) from all over the world. Everywhere people are doing such fascinating work!!

Just mindlessly went to the "applications" folder on my computer and wondered why my faculty applications weren't there. I could probably use some more sleep.

For the second time this year, I have 2 papers published on consecutive days. Feeling very fortunate to be a part of this incredible research team!

One unexpectedly difficult part of going on the faculty job market is continually falling in love with various departments as you apply, knowing that you'll never join the vast majority of them.