Matthew Sullivan, Ph.D.
Ohio State University
Matthew Sullivan, Ph.D., is a professor at the Ohio State University and a world leader in virus ecology. His research aims to understand the environmental impacts of viruses of microbes (phages) and their hosts, to ultimately predict carbon fate through a combination of culture-based experiments, multiomics field data analyses, population genetics, and computational, bioinformatic and modeling approaches. To make these “virus” capabilities broadly accessible, he has established and maintains ‘iVirus’ as funding allows on both NSF and DOE funded collaborative cyberinfrastructures.  
In marine ecosystems, he helped establish genomic catalogs for 579K and 6K DNA and RNA virus ‘species,’ respectively, throughout the global Tara Oceans datasets and used these to demonstrate their genomic features (including C, N, S cycling), infection of prominent hosts and roles in the biological carbon pump. In soils, he helped uncover patterns of virus ecology in thawing permafrost gradients in an extensively characterized, model climate-sensitive ecosystem to study microbial perturbation in response to climate change with environmental phage therapy research as the current focus.  
At Ohio State, Sullivan is the founding director of the Center of Microbiome Science, co-directs the Infectious Disease Institute’s Microbial Communities Program and is a member of several interdisciplinary training programs in biophysics, environmental science and biomedicine. The Center of Microbiome Science, part of the Microbiome Centers Consortium, has as its mission to empower microbiome science for the design and prediction of microbial communities in animal, plant, human, environmental and engineered systems and supports >130 faculty across nine colleges through a centralized genome-resolved microbiome platform and diverse programming.
In marine ecosystems, he helped establish genomic catalogs for 579K and 6K DNA and RNA virus ‘species,’ respectively, throughout the global Tara Oceans datasets and used these to demonstrate their genomic features (including C, N, S cycling), infection of prominent hosts and roles in the biological carbon pump. In soils, he helped uncover patterns of virus ecology in thawing permafrost gradients in an extensively characterized, model climate-sensitive ecosystem to study microbial perturbation in response to climate change with environmental phage therapy research as the current focus.  
At Ohio State, Sullivan is the founding director of the Center of Microbiome Science, co-directs the Infectious Disease Institute’s Microbial Communities Program and is a member of several interdisciplinary training programs in biophysics, environmental science and biomedicine. The Center of Microbiome Science, part of the Microbiome Centers Consortium, has as its mission to empower microbiome science for the design and prediction of microbial communities in animal, plant, human, environmental and engineered systems and supports >130 faculty across nine colleges through a centralized genome-resolved microbiome platform and diverse programming.