Nathan Crook
Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
he/him/his
College of Engineering
Bio
The Crook Lab develops new high-throughput experimental and computational genetic engineering techniques. In doing so, we hope to uncover novel biological phenomena and accelerate applied research and development in the broad areas of metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, and microbial ecology.
Our particular application focus is delivering drugs and other important molecules via the human gut microbiota. The ability of the gut microbiota to influence health has recently been uncovered, enabled by high-throughput DNA sequencing and animal models in which community composition is precisely controlled. Our goal is to engineer gut commensal ecosystems to convert food into a healthy mixture of energy, nutrients, and therapeutics.