Rob Knight is the founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and Professor of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego. He is the author of "Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes" (Simon & Schuster, 2015), and coauthor of "Dirt is Good: The Advantage of Germs for Your Child's Developing Immune System (St. Martin's Press, 2017). He co-founded the Earth Microbiome Project, and the American Gut Project, which is among the largest crowdfunded science projects of any kind to date. He has spoken at TED and Davos, written three books and over 600 scientific articles, and in 2017 he won the Massry Prize, often considered a predictor of the Nobel. His work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease, has enhanced our understanding of microbes in environments ranging from the oceans to the tundra, and made high-throughput sequencing techniques accessible to thousands of researchers around the world.