Joseph F. Petrosino, Ph.D., is the chief scientific innovation officer at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also professor and chairman of the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology. He received his Ph.D. from Baylor in 1998 and remained at the College for his postdoctoral training in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics. In 2004, he joined the faculty of the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology.
Dr. Petrosino was a principal investigator for the National Institutes of Health Common Fund Human Microbiome Project. In 2011, he established the Alkek Center for Metagenomics and Microbiome Research (CMMR). The CMMR’s mission is to develop and implement advanced technologies to understand how the microbiome impacts health and disease and to translate this knowledge for better therapeutics and diagnostics. Within the CMMR, the Petrosino Laboratory employs a variety of biological, genomic and informatic approaches to dissect the role of commensal microbes in human health. Over the past 11 years, the CMMR has established over 500 microbiome-related projects with over 300 international collaborators, and it has elevated the understanding of how the microbiome impacts numerous diseases. Dr. Petrosino’s achievements in the microbiome arena led him to be named an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer from 2012-2014.
In 2013, Dr. Petrosino founded Diversigen, a BCM Technologies start-up, where the robust pipelines built in the CMMR have been commercialized to support biotech and pharmaceutical company needs in the microbiome and metagenomics-related arenas. He sits on the scientific advisory boards of several biotechnology, pharmaceutical and nutrition companies and has contributed to more than 200 peer-reviewed microbiome studies.
