Department Seminar Series: Lingchong You, Ph.D.
This event is part of the CBEE DEPARTMENT SEMINAR SERIES
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CBEE Department Seminar Series
Lingchong You, Ph.D.
James L. Meriam Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Director, Center for Quantitative Biodesign
Duke University
Title: Predictive microbiome engineering
Abstract:
Predictive control of microbial communities is challenging because their dynamics emerge from interactions among community members, mobile genetic elements, and the environment. Yet our computational and experimental studies reveal an emerging simplicity beneath this complexity. In this talk, I will describe how we use machine learning to identify low-dimensional representations that capture key features of microbial community dynamics, and how coarse-grained models can provide complementary predictive descriptions. I will then discuss horizontal gene transfer as a mechanism that can stabilize community function despite changes in community composition, effectively reducing the dimensionality of the dynamics that must be controlled. Together, these results suggest that complex microbial communities may be more predictable and engineerable than their enormous compositional complexity would imply, opening opportunities for scalable microbiome engineering in medicine and biotechnology.
Biography:
Lingchong You is the James L. Meriam Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, Director of the Duke Center for Quantitative Biodesign, and Director of Graduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering. His lab (youlab.bio) combines mathematical modeling, machine learning, and quantitative experiments to uncover principles governing microbial community dynamics and to apply these principles in engineering and medicine. Dr. You pioneered the programming of collective microbial behaviors in time and space through chemical and genetic communication. He is a David and Lucile Packard Fellow (2006), DuPont Young Professor (2008), NSF CAREER Award recipient (2010), and Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2019). He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Molecular Systems Biology, PLOS Computational Biology, Quantitative Biology, and ACS Synthetic Biology.