Bio

Nathan Crook joined NC State in January 2018 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Microbiomes and Complex Microbial Communities. An assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, he is broadly interested in engineering microbial communities, whether they are located in an industrial, agricultural or medical setting.  To perform this engineering, his lab develops and applies novel high-throughput forward engineering and genomic analysis methods. Crook’s lab currently studies colonization and gene expression in probiotic organisms, and applies this knowledge toward delivery of additional gene functions to the human body. His interests include engineering both commensal fungi (the “mycobiome”) as well as bacteria. He is also excited to investigate the evolutionary forces which shape genomes within microbial communities. The Crook Lab blends experimentation, theoretical modeling, and computational analysis to build, predict and interpret novel microbial community architectures.

Crook received his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in the laboratory of Hal Alper. Prior to joining the NC State faculty, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Genome Sciences at the Washington University in Saint Louis School of Medicine in the laboratory of Gautam Dantas. Crook is excited to motivate and educate the next generation of scientists and engineers in the classroom and research laboratory.

Engineering Microbial Communities for Health, Sustainability, and Biotechnology

Sustainable solutions for human health, food production, and environmental stewardship will require technologies that work in complex, real-world settings. The Crook Lab develops foundational tools to engineer microbial communities, multispecies ecosystems that outperform single organisms through division of labor, adaptability, and resilience. While such communities dominate natural environments, they remain difficult to design and control. The group addresses this challenge by creating high-throughput experimental and computational approaches that enable predictable assembly and function of engineered microbial ecosystems. A major application focus is the human gut microbiota, where precisely designed microbial communities could transform how food is converted into energy, nutrients, and therapeutics. By advancing the ability to reliably engineer living ecosystems, this work creates new pathways toward scalable, biology-based solutions in health, sustainability, and biotechnology.