Bio:  Dr. Murat Eren is an Assistant Professor in the department of Medicine and affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory at the University of Chicago. He received his B.S. from Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey in 2002, and his PhD from the University of New Orleans in 2001, both in computer science. His research focuses on the diversity and functioning of microbial communities in environments ranging from the human gastrointestinal tract and oral cavity, to sewages, oceans, and soils. He designs algorithms and experiments to better understand microbes and their ecology. He pursues interesting ecological and evolutionary questions, with some particularly interesting insights from molecular data into what constitutes a population in the microbial world.

Insights into ecology and evolution of microbial populations through single-amino acid variants

Neither the mechanisms by which genomic heterogeneity emerges within naturally occurring microbial populations, nor how it drives the partitioning of ecological niches are well understood. Yet the increasing number of environmental metagenomes with astonishing depth of sequencing offer new opportunities to investigate evolutionary processes acting upon them, and link genomic variation to predicted tertiary structures of genes to gain biochemical insights.

MICDE is co-sponsoring this seminar with the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. If you would like to meet Dr. Murat during his visit please send an email to [email protected]