Philip Hugenholtz

Professor Philip Hugenholtz is a world-leading and highly-cited expert in microbiome analysis as well as Director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at The University of Queensland. Together with fellow Co-founder Professor Gene Tyson he oversees the scientific direction of Microba, using his groundbreaking experience in classifying unknown bacteria to drive innovation forward. Professor Hugenholtz completed his PhD in microbiology in 1994 at The University of Queensland and worked in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley and at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as the Metagenome Program Head. Throughout his career he has published hundreds of papers in high-impact journals in the field of microbiology and genomics and has been instrumental in the development of many of the methods used in microbiome analysis. He has been cited in other research articles more than 47,000 times. His research in microbiology has led to the discovery and characterisation of many previously unrecognised major bacterial and archaeal lineages, and the development of a new international standard for classifying bacteria with his team at The University of Queensland in 2018. Professors Hugenholtz and Tyson founded Microba with the vision to advance understanding of how the human gut microbiome influences health through their expertise in metagenomic microbiome sequencing.