Dan Knights

Dr. Dan Knights is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Biotechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota. Dan received his PhD from the University of Colorado in Computer Science, and went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. In his multidisciplinary research lab, his team applies machine learning techniques to study gut microbes and disease, building bioinformatics tools for microbiome-targeted drug discovery and analysis of diet-microbiome interactions. Dan is co-author on over 100 peer-reviewed articles on the microbiome and machine learning Throughout his career, Dan has developed computational methods that researchers use to study the human microbiome. These methods are used in his lab to discover new ways the microbiome is linked to human health, including investigations in obesity, hospital-acquired infections, inflammatory bowel disease, and irritable bowel syndrome. Dan has also been an active participant in community-based work, where has discovered significant changes that occur in the human gut microbiome of immigrants as they experience ‘Westernization’ changes towards microbiomes linked to obesity. In 2017 Dan, along with Drs. Kenny Beckman and Daryl Gohl from the University of Minnesota Genomics Center founded CoreBiome, now Diversigen, a microbiome analysis company bringing together cutting-edge machine learning and genomics. Dan is now co-leading Diversigen with Joy Nassif, where together they are accelerating the translation of the microbiome in healthcare, agriculture, and industrial monitoring with large-scale data generation and big data analysis using artificial intelligence and machine learning.