The 2024 Berg Lecture “Simple predictive rules in microbial community assembly: From the lab to the world’s oceans” will be presented by Jeff Gore, Physics of Living Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A reception hosted by the Department of Microbiology to follow, 6:00-7:30 p.m.

Dr. Gore joined the MIT Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in January 2010 after spending the previous three years in the Department as a Pappalardo Fellow working with Alexander van Oudenaarden. With the support of a Hertz Graduate Fellowship, in 2005 he received his PhD from the Physics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate research in single-molecule biophysics was done in the laboratory of Carlos Bustamante, focusing on the study of twist and torque in single molecules of DNA.

Microbes exist in complex, multi-species communities with diverse interactions that play an essential role in both human health as well as the health of the planet. Over the last decade tremendous progress has been made in characterizing these communities, but the lack of experimentally tractable model systems has made it difficult to discern the rules governing microbial community assembly and function. In this talk I will describe our recent experimental efforts to develop a bottom-up approach to understanding the dynamics of multispecies communities. We find that simple, phenomenological descriptions of microbial interactions provide insight into how communities change under stress. This modeling approach correctly predicts how laboratory microcosms change with temperature as well as how marine communities change over seasons, latitude and depth. This work demonstrates that integrating simple theoretical models with experimentally tractable laboratory microcosms can provide surprising predictive insight into natural communities.

Lecture at 5:00pm in Construction & Engineering Hall

Reception at 6:00 pm in Guistina Gallery

RSVP Here: https://oregonstate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b95Iar3XgR5LOwC