Lawrence David

Principal Investigator, David Lab

Associate Director, Duke Microbiome Center

Associate Professor, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology / Center for Genomics and Computational Biology

The Research

Lawrence’s research interests span multiple disciplines. He holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University, where he collaborated with the Applied Mathematician Chris Wiggins on genetic network inference. He then pursued a Ph.D. in Computational and Systems Biology at MIT under Eric Alm. For his dissertation, he developed phylogenetic algorithms that tracked the emergence of marine bacterial species and studied how oxygen’s introduction into the biosphere impacted microbial evolution.

Upon completing his doctorate, Lawrence held a three-year Principal Investigator position at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, where he partnered with Peter Turnbaugh to investigate human gut microbial ecology. They discovered that an ecological succession takes place in the human gut after a cholera infection and that the human gut microbiome can shift within a day of diet change. In many ways, this fellowship spawned what would later become FoodSeq.

Now as a tenured faculty member at Duke, Lawrence focuses on refining FoodSeq, helping to build an open-source genetic repository of human dietary species, and pursuing translational opportunities based on the lab’s research. His research also explores the interface of nutrition and metabarcoding studies to show how gut microbial resource availability is shaped by host diet, physiology, and microbial communities. The David Lab has also begun exploring how breakthroughs in genomics can address longstanding problems in nutritional epidemiology. The multifaceted nature of FoodSeq and the David Lab’s work are both a reflection of a career marked by interdisciplinary pursuits.

Visit Google Scholar for a comprehensive list of his papers and publications.

Curriculum Vitae

For Lawrence’s full CV, click here.