Curtis Robert Young
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
48-120 MIT
15 Vassar St.
Cambridge, MA. 02139 USA

email: cyoung (at) oeb.harvard.edu, cryoung (at) mit (dot) edu
tel (cell): 831-325-7034

Understanding how ecological and evolutionary processes create and maintain biodiversity, including ecological responses to human-mediated environmental change, is one of the most important and difficult problems facing the biological sciences. My research, broadly defined, seeks to do just that. I have worked on a variety of systems, from marine organisms to large mammals. Recently, I have become interested in understanding microbial communities. The genomic revolution has opened many exciting avenues of research in the study of biodiversity, none more so than the study of the largest reservoir of genetic and metabolic diversity, the microbial biosphere. My research involves several areas of interest related to genomics and evolutionary biology. These areas of interest include eukaryotic speciation, intracellular symbiont evolution, and the application of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to understand microbial ecological systems. I use a combination of laboratory and quantitative approaches to address these questions. My research includes:

1. Empirical studies aimed at understanding larval dispersal and host-symbiont interactions in globally distributed hydrothermal vent taxa. This work has led to the study of how geological and ocean transport processes (i.e., extinction and recolonization and bathymetrically-driven deep ocean circulation) affect diversity in these environments.
2. Developing statistical tools to answer ecological and evolutionary questions that arise in my empirical research.
3. Developing ecological theory that identifies important biological processes (e.g., mating behavior) that might interact with policy decisions in the management of natural populations. This work has been applied to the Sealous Game Reserve in Tanzania.
4. Understanding how marine microbial communities respond, both taxonomically and metabolically, to environmental conditions.

These foci require a multidisciplinary scientific approach that combines empirical, statistical and theoretical pursuits that bridge the fields of genetics, population biology, behavior, benthic ecology, microbiology, physical oceanography, and geology. My deep-sea field work has been conducted during 17 research cruises to explore seeps or hydrothermal vents and seeps in areas such as Monterey Bay, Juan de Fuca/Gorda Ridges, East Pacific Rise, Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, Fiji/Lau Basin, and the Central Indian Ridge. Many of these cruises were either on WHOI's research vessel the R/V Atlantis (the mothership of the DSV Alvin), MBARI's vessel, the R/V Western Flyer (the mothership of the ROV Tiburon) or the R/V Knorr / R/V Melville (using the ROV Jason). To see a few pictures of my travels, visit the 9N Alvin 2000 or Indian Ocean 2001 pages. A complete list of the research cruises that I have participated in can be found in my c.v..

In the Cavanaugh lab: I studied the genetic population structure of symbionts associated with deep-sea hydrothermal vent mussels of the genus Bathymodiolus, the genomic evolution of predominantly vertically transmitted symbionts of Vesicomyid clams, and the microbial diversity in human-associated pathogens.

In the DeLong lab: I am developing computational tools to understand microbial diversity and metabolism in both experimental and natural systems.

MCMC course: I taught a half-day workshop on Markov Cain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods applied to population genetics at MBARI in 2006 that included such topics as Markov chains, MCMC convergence diagnostics, MCMC algorithm tuning, and hypothesis testing. The course received very good reviews at all levels (graduate students through senior research scientists) from institutions including MBARI, UCSC, Stanford, and Berkeley. The concepts covered in the workshop are general, and can be applied to any MCMC approaches. I conducted a similar workshop in 2009 at Ewha Wommans University in Seoul, Korea that was attended by 59 participants from 14 institutions. This workshop included a lab devoted to assessing MCMC convergence form output generated by MrBayes. If you are interested in such a course or a derivation of it, please contact me. Notes from these courses and supporting material (e.g., R scripts, example data, etc.) can be found on the MCMC workshop page.

2008 JGI User Meeting: Genomics of Energy & Environment: This international gathering of researchers with an interest in sequence-based science will offer three days of user presentations, tours, workshops, and poster sessions. This year's meeting will specifically emphasize the genomics of renewable energy strategies, biomass conversion to biofuels, environmental gene discovery, and engineering of fuel-producing organisms. A series of presentations by leading scientists advancing these topics will feature a keynote address by Berkeley Lab Director and Nobelist Steve Chu.

American Society for Microbiology: 108th General Meeting

Evolution 2008

Workshop on the Taxonomy and Phylogeny of Vesicomyid and Mytilid Bivalves
Initiated by ChEss, a field project of the Census of Marine Life

July 13

Ewha Womans University
MCMC Convergence Workshop in Evolutionary Biology, Instructor

California Dreaming