Dr. Benjamin Callahan received a B.S. in physics and math from Iowa State University and began to work on problems in quantitative biology, while obtaining a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduation, Callahan trained as postdoc at Stanford University, first in the applied physics department then in the statistics department. It was during his time in Dr. Susan Holmes laboratory that Callahan began focusing on the microbiome field, with a focus on computational and quantitative analyses of microbiome data. 
 
Callahan joined the faculty of North Carolina State University in Jan. 2017 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in microbiomes and complex microbial communities. Callahan’s research program at N.C. State focuses on microbomes and the high-throughput methods used to characterize them, in particular marker-gene and metagenomic sequencing. He develops new statistical and bioinformatic methods to better characterize microbial communities from high-throughput biological data. Callahan uses those methods to study important problems, such as the relationship between the maternal microbiome and preterm birth and the barriers to reproducibility and interoperability between microbiome measurements made in different laboratories. Callahan and his group also develop and support software used by the wider microbiome research community in a wide variety of applications.