Ian Hines (Fed)

Ian Hines is a microbiologist in the Complex Microbial Systems Group at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD. His research encompasses many approaches to studying microorganisms including pathogen surveillance, generation of bespoke contrived standards, genomic sequencing and assemblies, metagenomic assemblies and analyses, and functional genomics. By advancing our abilities to work with microorganisms and microorganism communities (microbiomes), we unlock untold amounts of potential to benefit our society.

Microbial life exists in virtually any environment with which we as humans interact. There are estimates that 1 trillion unique microbial species exist on Earth! As microbiologists, our work seeks to understand the relationship between these organisms and humans. The work we do here at NIST includes, but is not limited to, assistance on programs that design better ways to find and isolate microorganisms, designing new methodologies to track microorganisms, developing standardized metrics for microbiome analyses, and deep analyses of soil and gut microbiomes. Our lab is outfitted with the ability to culture multitudes of pathogenic bacteria, fungi (including filamentous fungi), and viruses. Even organisms that are really picky about their environmental conditions (fastidious microbes) can be cultured here. In addition to the culturing capabilities in the lab, we also extensively study how to better computationally analyze individual microorganisms and the complexity of microorganism communities that make up microbiomes. Ian has developed multiple pipelines for these analyses including a genomic assembly and metadata generation pipeline for characterizing individual microbes and a deeply-sequenced shotgun metagenomics assembly and analysis pipeline. Because the field of microbiology estimates that it is only accessing ~1% of the total microbial life, our eventual aim is to combine all our techniques and expertise to increase the number of culturable microorganisms. By increasing our culturable numbers, we will be able to harness the power of more and more microorganisms for our benefit.

Currently, Ian is focused on (i) leading the IV&V effort for a DARPA-BTO program, (ii) characterizing the metagenome of the NIST RM 8048 human fecal microbiome reference material, and (iii) assisting with the creation of the NIST Microbial Strain Collection (NMSC).