Professor
Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis
Gautam Dantas, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Pathology & Immunology, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Department of Molecular Microbiology, and the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology, at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Washington under the guidance of Dr. David Baker, and post-doctoral training in microbial genomics from Harvard Medical School under the guidance of Dr. George Church. Dr. Dantas’s current research focuses on (1) understanding and predicting how diverse microbiomes respond to chemical and biological perturbations, (2) harnessing these insights to rationally design therapeutic strategies to curtail antibiotic resistant pathogens and remedy pathological microbiome states, and (3) engineering microbial catalysts to convert renewable biomass into value chemicals such as biofuels and pharmaceuticals. His group has published over 115 research manuscripts, including 8 papers in Science, Nature, and Cell, and they also hold 5 patents in microbial biotechnology and therapeutics. Dr. Dantas leads an interdisciplinary research and training group of basic scientists, engineers, and clinicians, spanning formal expertise in microbiology, biochemistry, genomics, pathology, infectious diseases, pediatrics, ecology and evolution, systems biology, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, and computational biology. Since 2009, he has mentored fifteen postdoctoral fellows, thirty graduate students, eight research technicians, and over 75 high-school and undergraduate interns. He is a recipient of the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Harvard University Certificate for Distinction in Teaching, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Breakthrough Award, the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation Scholar Award, the Academy of Science – St Louis Innovator Award, the Washington University Distinguished Educator Award, and American Academy of Microbiology Fellowship. More information about the Dantas Lab can be found at http://www.dantaslab.org