Environmental Observing Systems
I was fortunate to have Carl Woese, the Father of the microbial Tree of Life, as a mentor on microbes at UIUC in the 1990s. In 2005, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funded me to create a Calit2 computational and storage complex to become a global repository for microbiome ecology datasets. Together with colleagues at UCSD and the J. Craig Venter Institute we created the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA), housed in Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute. By 2013 CAMERA was serving over 5000 remote users in 90 countries. Then in 2014, I helped recruit Rob Knight to UCSD and have been a close collaborator of his since. With his Center for Microbiome Innovation’s extraordinarily talented team, as well as other UCSD collaborators, I have helped investigate many frontier areas of the exploding field of microbiomes and how they interact with their hosts or environments