Rob Knight is a Professor of Pediatrics and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego; he is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the American Academy of Microbiology.
Professor Knight co-founded the American Gut Project and the Earth Microbiome Project and is committed to revolutionizing how we understand the microbiome. His work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions, including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease, enhancing our understanding of microbes in environments ranging from the oceans to the tundra, alongside making high-throughput sequencing techniques accessible to thousands of researchers around the world.
The Knight lab from which The Microsetta Initiative runs has produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline (cited over 17,000 times as of this writing) and UniFrac (cited over 7,000 times including its web interface).
