A. Murat Eren

A. Murat Eren (Meren) is a Professor at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity in Oldenburg, Germany, with connections to the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the intersection of computer science and microbiology, particularly in studying the evolution and ecology of microbial populations through integrated 'omics and wet lab strategies.

Dr. Eren serves the microbiology community by creating advanced open-source software, following open and reproducible science practices, and engaging in public educational and outreach activities. His laboratory develops computational tools that help researchers explore genes of unknown function in microbiomes, with a particular emphasis on making the "dark side" of genomes and metagenomes accessible to the broader scientific community.

His research interests span across microbial dark matter, computational biology, metagenomics, and the development of open-source software for microbiome analysis. Dr. Eren is particularly interested in unifying the known and unknown microbial coding sequence space, as evidenced by his work on the AGNOSTOS framework which aims to help microbiologists integrate all genes found in genomes and metagenomes into their ecological and evolutionary investigations.

Dr. Eren is an advocate for transparent scientific communication and has developed several widely used bioinformatics tools that have advanced the field of microbiome research, most notably the anvi'o platform.

As a mentor, Dr. Eren is committed to training the next generation of scientists, with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches that bridge biology and computer science. He has mentored numerous students interested in microbiome and computational biology research.

His laboratory maintains strong collaborations with researchers around the world and is actively involved in community-building efforts within the microbiome research field. Dr. Eren is particularly passionate about making scientific tools and data accessible to researchers regardless of their institutional resources.