Not long after Rob Knight started his first lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2004, one of his graduate students, Catherine Lozupone, approached him and asked to make a change. Knight’s lab was studying an appendage called the Type III secretion system, which some Gram-negative bacteria use to detect and infect eukaryotes. Lozupone told Knight she didn’t want to study the secretion system any more. Instead, she said, she wanted to study microbial diversity using computational methods.“We had had a conversation about this when she first joined the lab, and I had said to her, ‘You know Cathy, I don’t want to stop you from following your dreams, but at the same time, Type III secretions is a hot area of science. And as far as the microbial diversity stuff, even MacArthur genius award winner and National Academy member Norman Pace can’t …
