Karthik Yarlagadda

I am a PhD Candidate in biological anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I study how factors like diet, environment, and social behavior influence the microbiome at large. Due to the numerous influences on the microbiome, it is frequently helpful to control for as many variables as possible to isolate the factors I'm particularly interested in. As a result, I work with the microbiomes of dogs and vampire bats, both as proxies for humans. By isolating contributions of specific factors to microbial variation in model organisms, studies in humans can work towards identifying the effects of human specific factors on the microbiome.