Jacob Nearing completed his undergraduate degree and PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at Dalhousie University. Under the supervision of Dr. Morgan Langille, his doctoral research examined how microbial communities in the oral cavity are associated with lifestyle behaviours, demographic factors, and cancer diagnoses. He also investigated how the choice of bioinformatics tools can influence the biological conclusions drawn from microbiome studies authoring a landmark paper on how differing statistical methods for microbiome research can alter biological conclusions.

Following his PhD, Jacob moved to Boston to join Dr. Curtis Huttenhower’s laboratory at Harvard University. There, he continued his research on the human microbiome, developed several bioinformatics tools that improved statistical associations with microbiome data and the assignment of taxonomy to sequencing reads. Apart from his bioinformatics work Jacob also investigated how diet alters the gut microbiome in canine models.

Jacob is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Morgan Langille’s laboratory, where he works jointly with the Dr. Curtis Huttenhower’s laboratory to improve the characterization of functional variation in the human microbiome. To date, he has published 19 papers, including nine as first author and one as senior author, in journals such as Nature Communications, PNAS, Nucleic Acids Research, and Nature Methods.