Ben Woodcroft

As the informatics group leader at the Centre for Microbiome Research, Ben has the happy knack of enjoying most things but gravitates towards the development and application of bioinformatic techniques to study the microbial communities that drive the health of our planet. He currently holds an ARC Future fellowship and has published >200 free software projects.

The study of microbial ecology is almost always data-heavy since it involves the study of microbes in the context of their microbial community. Bioinformatics provides the statistical analysis, data science-based approaches and scalable computational toolsets necessary to study the structure and function of microbiomes from a wide range of environments. The group aims to advance the science of microbial bioinformatics by developing novel and widely applicable techniques, and implementing them with tools named after Australian birds.

Main research areas:

1) The global microbiome and big data

2) Climate change, permafrost thaw and the positive feedback of soil microorganisms

3) Tools for genome-centric metagenomics

4) Phylogenetic method development to find structure/symbiosis in microbial communities