A professor of pediatrics, bioengineering, and computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego has been named the new Wolfe Family Endowed Chair in Microbiome Research at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego.
"The microbiome is frequently overlooked in the field of medicine," Dr. Rob Knight says in a press release.
"As a world-renowned scientist, Dr. Knight does the necessary, underlying work that allows physicians to deeply understand what their patients are dealing with and how to properly treat them."
His new position will focus on the development of microbiome-based and companion diagnostics, which provide patients with early warnings of disease flares and can rapidly accelerate the process of finding the correct treatment, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
Knight's previous work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions, including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease.
His work has produced many of the initial software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline and UniFrac, both of which have been cited thousands of times.
"Though microbiome research is still in its infancy, our findings are already providing fundamental insight into a wide range of processes in human health and disease," Knight says.
"As this field continues to grow, we expect to execute
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