Jonathan is a co-founder and the CEO of FitBiomics, a biotechnology startup that is sequencing the microbiome of elite athletes to identify and isolate next-generation probiotics for applications in consumer health and nutrition. He will talk about research recently published in Nature Medicine, regarding discovery and functional validation of a performance enhancing microbe that eats lactic acid and promotes endurance. This work was done while Jonathan was a postdoctoral fellow George Church's lab at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, at Harvard, where he worked on transformative sequencing technologies and programmable cellular engineering.  Having played Division I college basketball at St. John’s University and coached inner city public high school basketball, one of Jonathan’s long-term goals is to use sports as a medium to inspire the next generation of scientists.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn how next-generation sequencing can identify novel probiotic species and strains
2. Learn how athletes’ have distinct microbial communities that are dynamic during performance and recovery phases