Abstract: Microbes drive the biogeochemical cycles that fuel the planet, and their viruses play important roles ranging from mortality and nutrient cycling to gene transfer in environments ranging from the oceans and soils to industrial fermenters and humans. However, our inability to “see” viruses in the environment challenges our broader and quantitative understanding of viral roles in ecosystem processes. My lab specializes in developing new experimental and informatic approaches to better “see” and interpret the diversity of wild viruses across myriad data types and environments. Together these methods link viruses to their hosts en masse, provide both single‐cell and population perspectives on virus‐host interactions, or help elucidate Viral Dark Matter that dominates surveys of viruses in nature. In natural communities, we have mapped much of the global virome, shown that viral genome sequence space is clustered (into ‘populations’ formally delineated as species), and provided hypotheses on the role of viral metabolic reprogramming in modulating ecosystem function. This ability to now ‘count’ biologically meaningful units for viruses in nature – both genes and ‘organisms’ – opens watershed possibilities for applying ecological and evolutionary theory and developing predictive modeling across diverse ecosystems. Beyond the oceans, microbes are emerging as major players in terrestrial and atmospheric biogeochemical and energy cycling, as well as many diseases humans. Viral roles in modulating these microbial impacts are virtually unstudied, but likely to be large. To this end, my lab is now optimizing and applying these novel ocean‐derived experimental and ‘big data’ analytical approaches to viral communities across diverse environments including sediments, the human lung and gut, and climate‐sensitive thawing permafrosts, with aspirations to explore roles of viruses in the atmosphere and the Built Environment.

Biography: Matthew Sullivan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department with joint appointments in Molecular and Cellular Biology, Soil Water and Environmental Science, and Biosphere 2. He received his BS in Marine Science from Long Island University Southampton College, an MPhil from Queens University of Belfast Northern Ireland (Fulbright Scholar), and PhD from MIT / WHOI in Biological Oceanography. His post-doctoral work was in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT. Current honors include a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Investigator Award, and recognition as a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow and a Beckman Scholar’s Undergraduate Mentor.