Jarrad Hampton-Marcell

Jarrad Hampton-Marcell is a former microbial ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory who specializes in microbial ecology focusing on host-microbe interactions and their influence on human health. Jarrad has played a significant role in furthering the understanding of how microbial taxa are influenced by human-associated and environmental factors that influence human health and their built-environments via consortiums such as Earth Microbiome Project (www.earthmicrobiome.org), Hospital Microbiome Project (http://hospitalmicrobiome.com/), and American Gut Project (www.americangut.org). Jarrad’s latest research explores the relationship between exercise and the gut microbiome uncovering the functional roles microbial-derived energy-producing bacteria play. Jarrad combines next-generation sequencing with machine learning to identify underlying associations in order to develop targeted experimental approaches. Jarrad is a local product of the University of Illinois school system receiving his BS (Molecular and Cellular Biology) and MS (Integrative Biology) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago (Ecology and Evolution). Jarrad is actively involved in outreach serving as co-lead for Argonne’s ACT-SO High School Research Program which has provided independent research opportunities for more than 250 African-American High School students in the Chicagoland area (https://blogs.anl.gov/aaa-erg/act-so/). He also serves as the Director of Athlete Research for the HEROH Foundation, a non-profit sports performance program who have assisted in developing more than 500 scholarship athletes across Chicago. Jarrad spends a majority of his free time coaching youth sports, speaking to high school students about being a minority in STEM, or spending time with his wife and children.