Dr. Dan Knights is a computational microbiologist. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota. Dan received his B.A. from Middlebury College, and his PhD from the University of Colorado, both in Computer Science and Computational Biology, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard. His research uses data mining and machine learning to aggregate and mine multiple sources of microbial and human genomic data for patterns linking to environmental conditions and human disease. Dan has co-authored articles in top multidisciplinary journals. In 2015 he was named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor by the University of Minnesota.