Benjamin Callahan

Bio

Dr. Benjamin Callahan joined NC State in January 2017 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Microbiomes and Complex Microbial Communities. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health and Pathobiology and a member of the Bioinformatics Research Center, Dr. Callahan’s research focuses on “microbiomes” — the complex microbial communities which inhabit and interact with almost every part of the world around us. He develops new statistical and bioinformatic methods to better characterize microbial communities from high-throughput biological data, and uses those methods to study important problems, such as the relationship between the maternal microbiome and preterm birth.

Dr. Callahan received a B.S. in Physics and Math from Iowa State University, and began to work on problems in quantitative biology while obtaining a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduation, Dr. Callahan worked as a postdoc in the Applied Physics and Statistics departments at Stanford University, where he studied adaptation in large populations through modeling, comparative genomics and experimental evolution.

CERTIFICATIONS
CFEP- Assistant Professor, Microbiomes and Complex Microbial Communities

Publications

• Phylogeny-guided microbiome OTU-specific association test (POST) , MICROBIOME (2022)
• Effects of danofloxacin dosing regimen on gastrointestinal pharmacokinetics and fecal microbiome in steers , SCIENTIFIC REPORTS (2021)
• Ultra-accurate microbial amplicon sequencing with synthetic long reads , MICROBIOME (2021)
• Clostridioides difficile carriage in animals and the associated changes in the host fecal microbiota , ANAEROBE (2020)
• Pathogen resistance may be the principal evolutionary advantage provided by the microbiome , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2020)
• The role of the microbiome in host evolution , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2020)
• Ultra-accurate Microbial Amplicon Sequencing Directly from Complex Samples with Synthetic Long Reads , (2020)
• Understanding and interpreting community sequencing measurements of the vaginal microbiome , BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology (2020)
• Ceftiofur formulation differentially affects the intestinal drug concentration, resistance of fecal Escherichia coli, and the microbiome of steers , PLOS ONE (2019)
• Consistent and correctable bias in metagenomic sequencing experiments , (2019)