Curtis Huttenhower, PhD, is a computational biologist whose work sits at the intersection of microbial community function and public health. He is Professor of Biostatistics and of Immunology & Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he also co-directs the Harvard Chan Microbiome in Public Health Center (HCMPH) and leads the Harvard Chan Microbiome Analysis Core—a shared resource that supports multi-omic microbiome studies from study design through analysis. He is additionally an Associate Member of the Broad Institute.
Huttenhower’s group builds statistical and computational methods for functional metagenomics and microbiome epidemiology, translating high-throughput multi-omics into clinically and ecologically meaningful insights. His lab played foundational leadership roles in the NIH Human Microbiome Project, including the Integrative HMP (HMP2), which linked longitudinal microbiome and host multi-omics to conditions such as IBD, pregnancy/preterm birth, and prediabetes. Among HMP2’s flagship resources is the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Multi’omics Database (IBDMDB), a deeply phenotyped, year-long cohort used globally for discovery and benchmarking.
His team’s publications and community resources—spanning metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, and integrated statistical frameworks—have helped define best practices for functional profiling and host–microbiome systems biology. Landmark syntheses from the HMP and iHMP consortia continue to anchor the field’s understanding of the structure, function, and dynamics of the healthy and diseased human microbiome.
Huttenhower’s training includes a BS (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology), MS (Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies), and a PhD (Princeton University, genomics; advisor: Olga G. Troyanskaya). His early career encompassed both software engineering and computational biology, informing his lab’s emphasis on scalable, reproducible analytics.
Selected honors
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NSF CAREER Award (2010); Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, 2012); Overton Prize, ISCB (2015).
Focus areas & contributions (for program blurbs/web modules)
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Functional metagenomics & microbiome epidemiology: Methods that translate shotgun and multi-omic data into actionable biology.
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Consortium leadership: Design and analysis leadership across HMP / HMP2 (iHMP); co-led IBD multi-omics efforts (IBDMDB).
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Infrastructure for public health microbiome research: Direction of the Harvard Chan Microbiome Analysis Core; co-direction of HCMPH.
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Broad Institute collaboration: Cross-institutional methods and resources for host–microbe systems biology.