Profile
Seppe Kuehn
Assistant Professor
Department of Ecology and Evolution and the College
Microbial communities inhabit every niche on earth, from oceans and soils to the human body. In these diverse contexts, complex communities of microbes perform metabolic processes upon which all life depends—from driving global nutrient cycles to impacting human health. Seppe Kuehn is working to uncover the ecological and evolutionary principles that have allowed these complex microbial communities to assemble, function, and persist. To solve this problem he combines insights from microbial ecology with conceptual, mathematical, and experimental approaches from physics.
His research has been published in Cell Systems, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The ISME Journal, Physical Review Letters, and eLife.
Kuehn, who is also a core member of the University’s Center for the Physics of Evolving Systems, holds a BS magna cum laude in physics from Beloit College and a PhD in chemical physics from Cornell University. While at Cornell, he was honored with the Howard Neal Wachter Memorial Prize for excellence in physical chemistry and the Tunis Wentink Prize for outstanding PhD thesis. Most recently, he was an assistant professor in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Photo credit: Hope Michelson