Spencer Diamond

Spencer Diamond leads research on in vitro microbiome modeling at the IGI.

As part of the Berkeley Initiative for Optimized Microbiome Editing (BIOME) at the IGI, his lab focuses on understanding how the features of microbiomes (interactions, organisms, pathways, and genes) individually contribute to microbiome collective behaviors impacting human health and climate change. Methodologies employed by the Diamond lab include high-throughput in vitro community cultivation, genome-resolved metagenomics, statistical modeling, and the application of targeted genetic editing within microbial community contexts. Diamond was a postdoctoral researcher and project scientist in Jill Banfield’s lab, where he worked on metagenomic characterization of natural microbial communities and led informatic efforts in the co-development of generalized strategies for targeted genome within microbial communities.