Dionysios Antonopoulos is a microbiologist studying how communities of microorganisms live and thrive together in a variety of environments. Currently, he is particularly interested in understanding how microbial communities maintain their stability in different environments. As a result, his research team is actively involved in creating new approaches for minimizing the complexity of natural microbial communities so that they can be studied in the laboratory.

Dr Gyorgy Babnigg is a bioinformatician/molecular biologist at the Biosciences Division and a senior fellow at the University of Chicago Computation Institute. He has developed several Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) at the Argonne National Laboratory and managed Oracle databases for more than a decade.

Dr. Kasthuri is a neuroscience researcher at Argonne and an assistant professor (adjunct) in the Department of Neurobiology at The University of Chicago. He has an M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine and a D.Phil. from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar. As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Kasthuri developed an automated approach to large-volume serial electron microscopy (“connectomics”). The Kasthuri lab continues to innovate new approaches to electron microscopic based connectomics reconstructions including making samples more amenable to automatic segmentation and combining proteomic and genomic approaches with electron microscopy. We are also now exploring the use of high-energy X-rays from synchrotron sources for mapping brains in their entirety. The Kasthuri lab is applying these techniques to developing, adult, and aged brains in service of answering the question: How do brains grow up and age?

Ken is an expert in the application of synchrotron x-ray radiation to address questions in biogeochemistry and environmental science, with an emphasis on coupled biotic-abiotic interactions and the role of the microbe-mineral microenvironment in effecting the transformations of contaminant metals and radionuclides.

Dr. Laible specializes in Biophysics, with a research emphasis on the metabolic engineering and functional characterization of membrane proteins. He joined Argonne National Laboratory in 1995 as a post-doc, examining the functional consequences of substitutions in membrane protein complexes of known structure that perform the initial energy and electron transfer reactions in photosynthetic organisms.

Sarah has worked at Argonne since 2010. In addition to having over a decade’s worth of expertise in molecular biology applications, she has spent the majority of that time working in and managing high throughput DNA sequencing facilities. Sarah was instrumental in troubleshooting the application of rRNA-based amplicon sequencing for the Illumina HiSeq2000 and MiSeq DNA sequencing platforms, as well as developing reproducible protocols in collaboration with Illumina. She continues to be an expert in DNA sequencing techniques focusing on characterizing microbial communities from environmental samples. Through her work at Argonne, Sarah has become an integral part of a research community of microbial ecologists, with a worldwide network of collaborators.