What is PreMiEr?

The Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) studies and improves the microbiomes of the built environment.

It is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded collaboration between Duke University, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (N.C. A&T), North Carolina State University (NCSU), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte).

What is a microbiome?

Microbiomes are the (mostly) unseen communities of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms that inhabit a specific environment.

Almost everywhere on Earth hosts a microbiome. Soils, oceans, air, buildings, and even your own body have different and complex microbiomes, and each can be unique!

What is the "built environment?"

The built environment refers to any space built by humans, generally what we refer to as “indoors.”

These spaces include your home, place of work, vehicle, hospital, and shopping mall. The average person can spend up to 90% of their life within built environments.

Why should we care about microbiomes of the built environment?

We are all too aware that some microbes can make us sick, and many of those can be picked up through contact with our immediate environment.

One mission of PreMiEr is to learn how to prevent harmful or pathogenic microbes from surviving in the built environment and help make our time spent indoors safer.

Can a building microbiome be "healthy?"

Recent advances in both materials and design have helped to improve the health of buildings and the people in them.

In PreMiEr, we are also attempting to learn if the presence of specific microbes can also lead to healthier indoor spaces.

Our researchers and partners may one day design buildings to promote the growth of those helpful microorganisms, all while educating a new and diverse generation of engineers.

“This center touches on the struggles any parent or caregiver undergoes because they want to make the best decisions about what their loved ones are exposed to, but that’s a really difficult thing to do because we don’t yet know what a healthy microbiome might look like in the places we spend most of our time. Our goal is to start to fill those data gaps and lay the foundation for researchers to dig into these important questions.”

Dr. Claudia Gunsch

Director, PreMiEr

Learn more about the Summer 2023 PreMiEr Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Program - Applications now being accepted!

PreMiEr’s vision is to develop an integrated framework that enables the bioinformed design of smart and healthy built environments while also broadly advancing microbiome engineering technologies.

Watch our video to learn more.

Latest News

PreMiEr Engages Local Middle School Students

Using the powers of science and a plastic bag for DNA extraction, PreMiEr faculty member Dr. Joshua Granek and graduate student Eva Kim recently traveled to a local middle school to introduce students there to the strange and complex world of soil microbiomes.

PreMiEr researcher, Dr. Lingchong You, co-authors paper on controlling cellular processes

Dr. Lingchong You, a professor in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University and PreMiEr researcher, recently co-authored a paper published in Nature Chemical Biology describing methods for compartmentalizing cellular processes in mammalian and bacterial cells. Among...

New publication on using computer models to predict microbiome-associated disease

Congratulations to PreMiEr researcher Dr. Yi-Hui Zhou of North Carolina State University who recently co-authored an article entitled "Leveraging Scheme for Cross-Study Microbiome Machine Learning Prediction and Feature Evaluations" in the journal Bioengineering. Link...