معرفی
Thomas J. Sharpton is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Department of Statistics at Oregon State University's College of Engineering. His research focuses on understanding the gut microbiome's role in health, ecology, and evolution through interdisciplinary approaches that combine computational, experimental, and analytical methods.
Dr. Sharpton earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from Oregon State University in 2003. His educational background provides a strong foundation for his interdisciplinary research at the intersection of microbiology, statistics, and computational biology.
Sharpton's research program centers on three interconnected areas: the microbiome's connection to health and behavior, the impact of exogenous factors on the gut microbiome, and the link between the gut microbiome and vertebrate ecology and evolution. His lab employs systems biology approaches to measure microbiome features and statistically model data to identify those linked to health. They also develop zebrafish as an experimental model to study environmental impacts on the microbiome and explore evolutionary connections across vertebrate species.
Analysis of Dr. Sharpton's recent publications reveals a strong focus on using zebrafish models to investigate microbiome-environment interactions, particularly regarding climate change, toxicant exposure, and nutritional impacts. His work increasingly emphasizes computational approaches, including statistical modeling of microbiome data and multi-omics integration. The research spans human health applications, environmental impacts, and evolutionary perspectives on host-microbiome relationships.
Dr. Sharpton's work is generously supported by major funding agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the United States Food and Drug Administration, along with the Morris Animal Foundation and the Oregon Agricultural Research Foundation.
The Sharpton Lab manages the Microbiome Core Facility at OSU, which provides services for microbiome data generation and analysis. They value interdisciplinary collaborations, commercial partnerships, and open science practices, developing open-source software and offering training workshops in microbiome data analytics. The lab has processed thousands of samples spanning human, mice, and zebrafish associated microbiomes.
