Harvard Club of San Diego

Larry Smarr: Exploring your inner microbiome

Date:  May 15, 2017

Reception:   5:30 p.m.

Lecture and Q&A:   6:30 p.m.

Location:  The Community Hall at La Jolla Country Day School, 9490 Genesee Ave, La Jolla, CA 92037

Ticket Prices:  $10 for HCSD members. $15 for non-members. No cost to students or teachers (but please "purchase" a complimentary ticket from our website). Click here to buy tickets!!!

Light refreshments will be served.

To truly understand the state of the human body in health or disease, we now realize that we must consider a much more complex system than medical science considered heretofore.  This is because we now know that the human body is host to 40 trillion microorganisms, ten times the number of DNA-bearing cells in the human body and these microbes contain 100 times the number of DNA genes that our human DNA does. The microbial component of our “superorganism” is comprised of hundreds of species with immense biodiversity. Because of the exponential reduction in the cost of sequencing the microbes DNA, we are in a period of rapid discovery about the differences in the microbiome ecology in health and disease, including  behavioral changes and neurodegenerative diseases. To put a more personal face on the “patient of the future,” I have been collecting massive amounts of data from my own body over the last five years. Having discovered that I had an autoimmune disease, inflammatory bowel disease, this data has revealed detailed examples of the episodic evolution of this coupled immune-microbial system. As similar techniques become more widely applied, we can look forward to revolutionary changes in medical practice over the next decade.

About Larry Smarr    

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before that he was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Smarr gives frequent keynote addresses at professional conferences and to popular audiences. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Atlantic, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Fortune, Business Week, CBS, and the BBC. In the last decade Smarr has become a pioneer in the quantified self movement. He continues to provide national leadership in advanced cyberinfrastructure, currently serving as Principal Investigator on the NSF Pacific Research Platform and previously was Principal Investigator on the NSF OptIPuter project and the Moore Foundation’s CAMERA microbial metagenomics project.

Smarr served on the NASA Advisory Council to 4 NASA Administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and for 8 years he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving 3 directors.

For recreation, he enjoys growing orchids and snorkeling coral reefs. Smarr can be followed on Facebook (larry.smarr.3), Twitter (@lsmarr), or on his portal http://lsmarr.calit2.net/.