Congratulations Dr. Wolff!

Congratulations to Ricky Wolff for successful completion of his PhD! In his whirlwind PhD, Ricky discovered a number of important facets of the human gut microbiome. In his first paper, Ricky discovered that strains in the human gut are stable through time, and that they display ecological characteristic of species-level diversity (Wolff et al. mBio 2023). Subsequently, he discovered that gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes, with an enrichment for adaptations at carbohydrate-digestion related loci and clear differences in selective pressures in different parts of the world with different lifestyles (now accepted at Nature!). Along the way, he made many seminal contributions to other papers in the lab, including showing that the diversity begets diversity hypothesis extends to the strain level, that strains show uniform frequencies along the gut, and that in fruit flies there are genetic elements important for colonization of strains. We are very excited for Ricky’s next steps as a postdoc at UCSD!