Reconstructing the universal tree and network of life

Talk by invited speaker Professor Philip Hugenholtz. Director of Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Short biography:
From a PhD in 1994 at The University of Queensland, Phil Hugenholtz developed a career in microbiology and genomics in the USA and in Australia. Phil’s last position in the USA was as Staff Scientist (2004-2010) at the DOE Joint Genome Institute.  In late 2010 Phil returned home to establish the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics.  The Centre was founded around himself as Director, and ARC QEII Fellow and Deputy Director, Associate Professor Gene Tyson.  Phil has published over one hundred papers in molecular microbial ecology including several Science & Nature papers.
Currently, Phil’s research interests include the microbial ecology and evolution of host-associated ecosystems such as the termite hindgut and human microbiome, and genomic mapping of the microbial tree of life.  He has helped pioneer the use of culture-independent molecular methods to characterise microbial communities including marker gene and shotgun (metagenomic) approaches.  In 2006, Phil received the Young Investigators Award from the International Society of Microbial Ecology (ISME), was elected in 2012 as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) and more recently, in June 2015, was successful in receiving an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship.

Recent research topics include an Australian Research Council funded metagenomics project on “Evolution of the marsupial gut microbiome and adaptation to plant toxins”. Based on a joint linkage grant obtained in 2015 from the Australian Research Council Phil Hugenholtz is now collaborating with Elizabeth Neilson, Mette Clausen and Birger Lindberg Møller at the Plant Biochemistry Laboratory, UCPH and with Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten and his staff at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, DTU on the project “Understanding the koala microbiome: unlocking the secrets of koala health and dietary specialisation, and successful husbandry and translocation”.