Dear colleagues,

I am thrilled to share that Avi Flamholz, a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, has accepted our offer to join the Rockefeller faculty. Avi will become an Assistant Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology, effective January 1, 2025. He emerged from the FY 2024 Open Search as the top candidate among 340 applications to the junior faculty search.  

Avi graduated from Princeton, majoring in computer science with emphasis on computational mathematics. He went on to work on computation at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he first became interested in the energetic, metabolic, and biological processes that drive climate change. This drew him to a Ph.D. thesis in David Savage’s lab at UC Berkeley, where he did brilliant work showing that a complex, CO₂-concentrating organelle found in cyanobacteria that enables carbon fixation in low ambient levels of CO₂ could be re-engineered to function in E. coli.

Avi moved to Caltech as a postdoc under the mentorship of Dianne K. Newman and Rob Phillips. As in his graduate work, he combined mathematical and statistical models with experiments, with an eye toward understanding the contributions of metabolism by soil microbes to the net flux of carbon in and out of the soil, a critical component of the global carbon cycle. He has developed a theory of microbial growth that incorporates redox chemistry as a factor in metabolic efficiency, while also exploring experimental and metagenomic approaches to define key features of soil metabolism.

Avi’s focus on the life science aspects of climate change is a timely addition to the University’s research and dovetails nicely with work in a number of other laboratories on campus. He also brings exceptional strength in applied mathematics and computer science, areas that bring new strength to our community.

The Open Search Committee, superbly led this year by Sohail Tavazoie, along with other faculty who met with Avi during his candidacy, were highly impressed by the exceptional breadth and depth of his scholarship, as well as his creativity and impressive talent as an experimentalist. He will be a great addition to our community.

Please join me in welcoming Avi to Rockefeller!

With all best wishes,