Thomas Sharpton

Thomas Sharpton’s research is broadly directed towards ascertaining how the commensal gut microbiome mediates human health. Motivated by the global chronic disease epidemic, Dr. Sharpton seeks to determine if recent changes in human lifestyle and exposure have disrupted the gut microbiome’s contribution to physiology. To address the complexity of this problem, his research team develops and employs high-throughput systems biology tools – including computational, experimental, and analytical methods – that rapidly disentangle the mechanisms through which the gut microbiome links to and drives health. These efforts include the development of computational and data resources for the analysis of metagenomes, statistical approaches to model microbiome data, and experimental techniques in in vitro and in vivo model systems, especially zebrafish. His research also frequently applies evolutionary considerations to the analysis of gut microbiome data, following the hypothesis that chronic disease emerges in part because human physiology has evolved to depend upon essential microbiome functions that modern lifestyle disrupts. His laboratory collaborates broadly to address these questions and has explored a variety of disease considerations, ranging from inflammatory bowel disease in adults to childhood mental health.