Biography

Po-Yi Ho is an assistant professor in the School of Engineering at Westlake University. He received his BS in physics from Yale University in 2014 and his PhD in applied physics from Harvard University in 2019. From 2019 to 2023, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, where he developed mathematical models and experimental model systems to engineer microbial communities. He is broadly interested in biophysics, synthetic biology, and microbial ecology and evolution.

Research Interests

Microbiomes colonize diverse hosts and environments, shape host health and environmental biochemistry, and are promising engineering targets for novel therapeutics. Our lab is making microbiome engineering quantitative by combining mathematical models and high throughput experiments. We are also broadly interested in the physics of living systems and synthetic biology.

To engineer microbiome composition or function, we build theoretical and experimental tools to dissect complex communities, with focus on the human gut microbiota.

-Diverse microbiotas exhibit special statistics of fluctuations in species abundances, and these fluctuations can be reproduced by a mathematical model of resource competition (Ho et al, eLife 2022). We are using this link to infer the ecological parameters of various microbiotas.

-A highly diverse yet defined model community reproducibly colonizes mice gut, and mice colonized by either the model community or human fecal communities are phenotypically similar (Cheng et al, Cell 2022). We are quantifying microbial interactions in this model system.

Microbes interact via a plethora of mechanisms, including resource competition, metabolic cross-feeding, and environmental modulation. We disentangle this complexity using community assembly experiments, metabolomics, genomics, and mathematical models.

-Metabolomic profiles of individual gut bacterial species allowed us to predict community dynamics in vitro (Ho et al, bioRxiv 2022). We are applying this approach to investigate microbial interactions in complex environments and during evolution.

-Antibiotic activity can affect the resource competition landscape and vice versa, and this interplay can result in synergism or antagonism among multiple antibiotics (Newton et al. Nat Commun., 2023). We are testing these predictions using high-throughput screens and leveraging them to engineer community dynamics.

Representative Publications (*Co-first author, ⁺Corresponding author)

1. Ho P*⁺, Nguyen TH*, Sanchez JM, DeFelice BC, and Huang KC+. “Resource competition predicts in vitro assembly of gut bacterial communities.” bioRxiv (in review).

2. Newton DP, Ho P⁺, Huang KC⁺. “Modulation of antibiotic effects on microbial communities by resource competition.” Nature Commun. 2023.

3. Cheng AG*, Ho P*, …, Huang KC, and Fischbach MA. “Design, construction, and in vivo augmentation of a complex gut bacterial community.” Cell, 185:3617-3636 (2022).

4. Ho P, Good BH, and Huang KC. “Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas.” eLife, 11:e75168 (2022).

5. Ho P, Martins BMC, and Amir A. “A mechanistic model for the regulation of cell division timing by the circadian clock in cyanobacteria.” Biophysical Journal, 118:2905-2913 (2020).

6. Ho P, Lin J, and Amir A. “Modeling cell size regulation: From single-cell level statistics to molecular mechanisms and population level effects.” Annual Review of Biophysics, 47:251-271 (2018).

Join us

We are always looking for motivated colleagues to join our lab. Given our interdisciplinary research interests, we welcome individuals from various scientific backgrounds. Positions are available at all levels, including undergraduate students, research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and research scientists. To apply, please send your CV, references, and a brief research statement to poyiho@westlake.edu.cn.

Postdoctoral researcher: https://en.westlake.edu.cn/Careers/OpenPositions/PostDoctoral/202303/t20230322_26726.shtml

Research assistant: https://en.westlake.edu.cn/Careers/OpenPositions/202303/t20230322_26724.shtml