The architecture of microbial life, read across scales.

A gram of soil holds thousands of bacterial species, and no two grams hold the same ones. Yet across disparate environments and experiments, the same statistical regularities keep appearing. We leverage these regularities to investigate the microbial world. Such patterns help us learn how abundances are distributed across space, how they fluctuate through time, and how the diversity of a community can be predicted and, ultimately, manipulated.

Architectonics is the word we use for our approach. We are not focused on building a catalog of who lives where. Instead, we work to pare down the seemingly complicated structure of microbial life, examining how our identified rules vary as one moves from a single strain to an entire biome.

Our approach is deliberately minimal. We ask how far a model with few parameters, often no more than stochastic growth with a carrying capacity, can be pushed before it fails. The failure is often the interesting part, as it is where unexplained physiology, ecology, and evolutionary history leave their signatures. We are not opposed to large-scale models and are interested in identifying microbiological problems where they provide the most benefit. The work sits between community ecology and population genetics, unified by principles and tools from statistical physics. We are a young lab and most of our work will be computational, though we intend to perform targeted experiments on the physiological and evolutionary consequences of life-history strategies.

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