Dr Mathew Brown - Newcastle University

Microbial communities are a critical, underexploited engineering resource. Many advances in engineering biology have built on insights gained from nature. In nature, viruses (bacteriophages), are agents of mortality, nutrient generation, and horizontal gene transfer, and can severely affect the stability of ecosystem functions. Yet, viruses are a forgotten constituent of engineered systems, particularly biological wastewater treatment systems, which are crucial to human health and environmental protection. Without a basic understanding of viral-host interactions or predation rates, we cannot fully comprehend biological wastewater treatment or model the microbial communities. This limits our understanding of the processes and makes meeting strict environmental regulation, and climate change targets more difficult.

Dr Brown aims to transform our understanding of the role viruses play in biological wastewater treatment systems towards a predictive understanding of viral–host interactions and, subsequently, microbial community dynamics, and system performance. This will be achieved by applying the best scientific principles, cutting-edge techniques, and experiments to understand, model, and exploit the rules and mechanisms governing viral–host interactions in those systems.