Microbial communities are essential for food production, human health, ecological restoration, resource extraction, and clean water. Interactions between microbes shape the structures of communities and impact their functional activity and robustness to changing environmental conditions. Advancing our fundamental understanding how microbial communities assemble and persist will enable rational engineering of microbiomes to address the most pressing challenges facing society today. Princeton is poised to tackle this challenge because of the strengths of research groups dispersed across campus, including the natural sciences and the genomics institute, environmental institute, and bioengineering institute.
