Quantitative Microbial Ecology

Undergraduate / Graduate

Microbes live in nearly every niche on the planet from our bodies to the soil beneath our feet. In all of these habitats, microbes live in communities that harbor staggering complexity with thousands of species possessing almost unimaginable variation in traits and interactions. From all of this complexity emerge global nutrient cycles, the functional microbiota within higher organisms, and many industrial processes upon which life depends. In recent years ecologists and microbiologists have joined forces with physicists, engineers, chemists, and computer scientists to try and build quantitative and predictive formalisms to understand these systems. This course gives students a front-row seat to this emerging field through a "physics-style approach" to understand the structure, dynamics, and function of complex communities of microbes. We engage with the general principles of microbial physiology. These considerations connect our inquiry to consumer-resource models and computational studies of resource-mediated interactions in microbial communities.