Benjamin John Callahan BS, PhD

Benjamin Callahan joined NC State in January 2017 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Microbiomes and Complex Microbial Communities. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Population Health and Pathobiology and a member of the Bioinformatics Research Center. Callahan studies microbiomes — the complex microbial communities which inhabit and interact with almost every part of the world around us. He has developed new bioinformatic methods to more accurately characterize microbial communities, and applied them to the study of the microbial contribution to the pathophysiology of preterm birth. He is also interested in adaptation within microbial populations, which he has studied with a mix of analytics, simulation and experimental evolution.
Callahan obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Iowa State University. He began to work on quantitative biology while obtaining a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara under the mentorship of Boris Shraiman. After graduation, Callahan completed two postdoctoral positions at Stanford University, the first with Daniel Fisher in applied physics, which focused on adaptive evolution, and the second with Susan Holmes in statistics, which focused on microbiome analysis.