Date: Friday 13th of March at 12:00 in Læknagarður room 343
Title: Microbial Metabolism and Research Integration in Systems Biology
Speaker: Dr. Scott Behie
Talk description: In this talk, I will discuss how integrating microbial ecology, metabolism, and host biology can help address some of the central challenges in microbiome science, and I will highlight how microbial metabolic activities shape host physiology. I will also outline my scientific career trajectory and current role at Bio2Q, and how these perspectives help drive research and scientific dissemination.
Bio: Scott Behie is the current director of research programs and a project professor at the Bio2Q research institute at Keio University in Tokyo. He received his PhD from Brock University and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent a number of years developing analytical approaches to investigate microbial secondary metabolism in naturally occurring microbiomes. He later served as an editor at the Cell Journal for five years before returning to academia last year. As director of research programs, he helps shape scientific strategy across the institute, and work closely with investigators to refine research narratives, develop interdisciplinary research programs, and navigate scientific publishing.
His research interests lie at the intersection of microbial ecology, chemical ecology, and metabolism, how microbial interactions within complex microbiomes shape community function and endogenous chemistry, and how these metabolic processes influence host biology. By combining analytical chemistry, microbial genetics, and ecological approaches, the aim is to uncover bioactive small molecules produced by microbes in natural settings, and particularly to uncover the role of fungi in stabilizing microbiome communities and understand how microbial metabolism structures biological systems across scales.
