Benjamin John Callahan
Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT OF POPULATION HEALTH AND PATHOBIOLOGY
North Carolina State University
United States of America
Biography
Dr. Benjamin Callahan joined NC State in January 2017 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Microbiomes and Complex Microbial Communities. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health and Pathobiology and a member of the Bioinformatics Research Center, Dr. Callahan’s research focuses on better understanding various “microbiomes” — the complex microbial communities which inhabit and interact with almost every part of the world around us. He develops new statistical and bioinformatic methods to better characterize microbial communities from high-throughput biological data, and uses those methods to study various interesting problems, for example the relationship between the maternal microbiome and preterm birth. Dr. Callahan received his Bachelors degree in Physics and Math from Iowa State University, and began to work on problems in quantitative biology while obtaining a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduation, Dr. Callahan worked as a postdoc in the Applied Physics and Statistics departments at Stanford University, where he studied adaptation in large populations through modeling, comparative genomics and experimental evolution. CERTIFICATIONS: CFEP- Assistant Professor, Microbiomes and Complex Microbial Communities
Research Interest
INFECTIOUS DISEASES
Publications
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(2016) DADA2: High resolution sample inference from Illumina amplicon data.Callahan BJ, McMurdie PJ, Rosen MJ, Han AW, Johnson AJ, Holmes SP | Nature Methods 13 581–583.
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(2016) Bioconductor workflow for microbiome data analysis: from raw reads to community analyses.Callahan BJ, Sankaran K, Fukuyama JA, McMurdie PJ, Holmes SP | F1000 Research 5:1492.
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(2016) 1,2-dichloroethane exposure alters the population structure, metabolism, and kinetics of a trichloroethene-dechlorinating Dehalococcoides mccartyi consortiumMayer-Blackwell K, Fincker M, Molenda O, Callahan BJ, Sewell H, Holmes S, Edwards E, Spormann A. | Environmental Science & Technology 50:12187–12196.
