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Trent Northen

Trent Northen, Ph.D., Metabolomics Technology Group Lead, DOE Joint Genome Institute

Dr. Northen is currently a Senior Staff Scientist at Berkeley Lab. Since joining Berkeley lab in 2008 Dr. Northen has had leadership roles within large DOE funded research programs using mass spectrometry for energy and environmental research including through the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the ENIGMA SFA project.  In 2015, he founded what is now the JGI Metabolomics Program to provide advanced metabolomic methods available to JGI users.  Dr. Northen’s research is focused on using metabolomics to link genomes with environments to understand how webs of microbes cycle carbon and sustain biomes via the development and application of advanced mass spectrometry approaches and model laboratory ecosystems (EcoFABs).

Education

  • B.S. in Chemical Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara
  • Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University
  • Post-doc in Metabolomics, The Scripps Research Institute
  • Executive Education, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
  • DOE Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership

Awards and Service

  • 2019 R&D100 Award
  • 2016 Berkeley Lab Director Exceptional Achievement Award
  • 2014 DOE Early Career Award
  • 2013 R&D100 Award
  • 2009 Presidential Award for Science and Engineering PECASE awarded by President Obama
  • Dr. Northen currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he was the interim Division Director within this same organization during the formation of the Division in 2015-2016. Dr. Northen regularly chairs workshops, organizes conference sessions, and serves on review panels. At Berkeley Lab he serves on a number of committees and is the Strategy Mentor for the Berkeley Lab Biosciences Environmental Strategy.

Publications

  1. Swift CL, et al. Anaerobic gut fungi are an untapped reservoir of natural products. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2021 May 4;118(18). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2019855118
  2. McGivern BB et al. Decrypting bacterial polyphenol metabolism in an anoxic wetland soil. Nature communications. 2021 Apr 29;12(1):1-6. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22765-1
  3. Zengler K et al. EcoFAB: Advancing microbiome science through standardized fabricated ecosystems. Nature Methods (16), 567–571 (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41592-019-0465-0.
  4. Couradeau E et al. Probing the active fraction of soil microbiomes using BONCAT-FACS. Nat Commun. 2019 10(1):2770. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-10542-0.
  5. Wang G et al. Chassis-Independent Recombinase-Assisted Genome Engineering Enables Rapid Activation of Biosynthetic Gene Clusters. Nat Microbiol. 4(12):2498-2510. doi: 10.1038/s41564-019-0573-8
  6. Zengler K. et al. EcoFAB: Advancing microbiome science through standardized fabricated ecosystems. Nature Methods (16), 567–571 (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41592-019-0465-0.
  7. Diamond S. et al. Mediterranean grassland soil C-N compound turnover is depth stratified, rainfall dependent, and is mediated by genomically divergent microorganisms. Nature Microbiology 2019 doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0449-y
  8. Swenson TL, Karaoz U, Swenson JM, Bowen BP, Northen TR, Linking soil biology and chemistry in biological soil crust using isolate exometabolomics. Nature Communications (2018) 9:19. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02356-9.