Eric J. Alm

Eric J. Alm is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), affiliated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research focuses on microbial evolution, systems biology, and computational approaches to understand microbial ecology and genetics. Alm holds a B.S. from the University of Illinois (1995), M.S. from University of California, Riverside (1997), Ph.D. from University of Washington (2001), and completed a postdoc at UC Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2005).

• B.S., 1995, University of Illinois, Urbana
• M.S., 1997, University of California, Riverside
• Ph.D., 2001, University of Washington, Seattle
• Postdoc, 2005, UC Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

His research interests include detecting natural selection in microbes, metagenomic data analysis, bacterial ecology modeling, and protein structure design. Notable work spans operon evolution, bacterial signal transduction systems, and computational biophysics. Alm’s publications reflect a trajectory from protein folding mechanisms (1999) to microbial evolutionary dynamics (2024). He was recognized in the 2021 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers List for impactful contributions. His lab, Alm Lab, integrates experimental and computational methods to address systems-level questions in microbiology.