
Biography
Falk is a Group Leader working across both the Earlham Institute and the Quadram Institute.
Falk is a bioinformatician with a passion for microbial ecosystems, bacterial evolution and developing computational systems to tackle these subjects in a combined perspective. Falk joined Earlham Institute in early 2019, developing metagenomic tools for tracking bacterial strains at high resolutions, to predict their genomic capabilities and explore their associations to diseases.
During his early career, Falk was working at the University of Constance (Germany) and the University of Sussex (UK) on bacterial evolution and tracking outbreaks of pathogens through following changes in their genomes. Moving from a genome centric view to a metagenomic view of whole microbial ecosystems, he worked during his PhD at the University of Brussels (Belgium) on bacterial associations to complex diseases such as IBD, obesity and Diabetes. For this, Falk developed bioinformatic pipelines to process 16S data (LotuS) as well as the statistical tools.
During his postdoc at EMBL Heidelberg (Germany), Falk continued his research on association to the human microbiome of complex diseases such as Diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, among others. His interests soon developed to track strains in the metagenomic datasets, as well as de novo assembling genomes from metagenomes. These techniques are mostly applied to the gut microbiome of mammals. Another interest of his is environmental metagenomics. For example, in 2018 he proved that in soils more fungi are usually connected to more antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and this is true on a local but also global scale.
Developing specialised algorithms that help answer complex questions on large biological datasets is the key ingredient for Falk’s scientific work.
Publications
Related reading.

New insights into resistance to antimicrobials could stop bacteria in their tracks

Excellent science? It’s in the technical detail

Finding fungi at the fen

The genetic machinery that drives biodiversity

On the origin of errors: the causes and consequences of mistakes during DNA replication

Could long-read RNA sequencing be the future of drug discovery?

Why is genome annotation important?

Key tilapia genome offers boost to global food security

Exotic wheat DNA could help breed ‘climate-proof’ crops

Sequencing project to unleash the huge potential of euglenoids

Circadian clock insights could be key to increased wheat yields

European consortium launched to reverse biodiversity loss through genomics research

Tracking bacterial evolution in real time spots emergence of antimicrobial resistance

Big Data initiative awarded £6.3 million as part of major UKRI investment in research infrastructure
