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Ben Knapp

As our planet undergoes dramatic changes to its climate, shifts in biodiversity due to increasing temperatures will alter the Earth’s ecosystem. In the soil, for example, bacteria are exposed to a wide range of temperatures, from daily to seasonal changes. Conversely, bacteria that inhabit the human intestinal tract normally live at a constant body temperature, while also overcoming temperature changes during fever and transmission. Questions about how individual bacteria and the communities in which they reside respond to temperature remain poorly understood. To study how bacteria adapt and respond to temperature changes, I will be investigating temperature perturbations of soil bacterial communities and then extend these methods to the human gut microbiota. This work will combine single-cell and engineering approaches, together with sequencing technology, to provide a rich dataset for connecting how single-cell behavior gives rise to community responses to temperature changes.