The group’s primary focus is to understand how external factors, such as stress, disease, lifestyle, and antibiotics, influence the longitudinal dynamics of microbiome communities. We develop innovative bioinformatics methods to analyze longitudinal metagenomic and metatranscriptomic datasets and generate original data to address essential questions: How stable are gut and oral cavity microbiomes over time? What factors cause these communities to shift from equilibrium and contribute to disease? Which specific bacterial populations drive these significant shifts? How do host-microbiome interactions affect the resilience and stability of microbial communities?