Prof. Daniel Segrè is a Professor of Biology, Biomedical Engineering and Physics, and a core faculty member in the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at Boston University. He is a member of the Biological Design Center and the founding director of the Boston University Microbiome Initiative. After training in Physics in Trieste, Italy, Prof. Segrè obtained a Ph.D. in the Life Sciences at the Weizmann Institute, Israel, where he studied the origin and evolution of living systems. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, and later as a faculty at BU, Prof. Segrè started developing mathematical and computational approaches for understanding metabolism at multiple scales, from individual organisms to large-scale ecosystems. Current work in the Segrè lab is focused on predicting, designing and experimentally testing metabolic activity in microbes and microbial communities, with applications in human microbiome research, marine and soil biogeochemical cycling, and synthetic ecology. Among other contributions, the Segrè group has pioneered some of the first algorithms for the design of new putative inter-species interactions, and has developed COMETS (Computation Of Microbial Ecosystems in Time and Space), a quantitative framework for simulating microbial ecosystems in spatially structured environments.