Alexander Chase

Alexander Chase
Assistant Professor, Department of Earth Sciences
abchase@smu.edu
214-768-6140

About

Earth's biogeochemical engineers, microbes, exist in highly abundant and diverse microbial communities, or microbiomes. To study these microscopic organisms, our lab uses a combination of field experiments and bioinformatics to link microbial genomic potential to ecosystem functions. Broadly, we are interested in the ecological and evolutionary processes contributing to which microbes live where and what they might be doing. Part of our research employs manipulating microbiomes in the lab and field to understand how their functions change with predicted climate change. Other aspects include surveying diverse environmental microbiomes to uncover their wealth of biopharmaceutical potential in the form of small molecule natural products. Ultimately, we use large metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, and metabolomic data collected from these microbiomes to uncover the mechanisms driving biogeographic patterns. Aside from my main interests in environmental microbiomes, our lab covers a wide spectrum of host-associated (including human microbiomes) and global environmental change interests that I would be more than happy to discuss further for future collaborations.

Lab website: https://www.microbomics.com/

SMU Faculty page: https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Academics/Departments/Earth-Sciences/People/Faculty/Alexander-Chase