Dr Chris Quince's research into the behaviour of microbial communities involves being able to accurately catalogue bacterial cells so small that the numbers involved are staggering: you could expect to find around a hundred billion of them in just a millimetre of a human gut.

Christopher Quince'One thing I'm involved with is human microbiomics, which is the study of microbial communities that are living on or in you,' he explains. 'It's only with the DNA revolution that we've been able to properly study these communities. It's estimated that you have ten times as many bacterial cells as you have human cells, which is significant, although obviously the bacterial cells are much smaller. And what's more interesting than the sheer numbers, is that it's a diverse community.'

The Glasgow academic has recently been involved in the process of cataloguing the microbial communities of two individuals that shows them to host a total of 800 species. But why would you want to be able to catalogue, or predict the behaviour of, these sorts of communities?

'When your bacterial community isn't functioning correctly, it is associated with various diseases, such as Crohn's,' he says. 'But also in your general wellbeing and health, they play an important role in the immune system.' Research that Dr Quince's collaborators have undertaken in the US has shown differences in the microbial communities of obese and lean people, for example, with links being made between a particular type of bacterial flora and the ability to convert food into fat.

Research like this might seem unusual for an academic working within the School of Engineering, but Dr Quince explains that it's not only in the human body where microbial communities can have an impact. In terms of environmental engineering, these communities also play a critical role in, for example, waste water treatment and the cleaning of polluted landscapes. This is the reason why Dr Quince, who labels himself a theoretical ecologist, came to work at Glasgow as the recipient of one of the University's prestigious Kelvin Smith Fellowships.

Established in 2006, the Kelvin Smith Fellowship scheme was created with the aim of supporting outstanding researchers in the early stages of their careers who have the potential to become leaders in their chosen fields. It has been named after two of the University's most innovative thinkers, Lord Kelvin and Adam Smith.

The Kelvin Smith Fellowship has certainly helped Dr Quince to fulfil his potential. The research he conducted has been instrumental in helping him to secure an Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) career-acceleration Fellowship, which will last five years.

'During the course of my Kelvin Smith Fellowship I was working on mathematical models with the head of my group, Professor William Sloan, and part of my EPSRC Fellowship is to continue that work,' Dr Quince says. Importantly, it gives the theoretical ecologist the chance to start his own research group, allowing the opportunities created by the original Fellowship to grow.

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