Theodore Muth, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Biology Department. My lab's research studies the microbial communities of urban soils and green infrastructure. A fundamental question driving our research is how humans impact urban microbial communities, and in what ways does the intensity of human activity influence the composition of these bacterial communities? Importantly, we wonder how bacterial diversity is impacted, and how this influences the critical nutrient and geochemical cycles that soil and water bacterial communities are known to contribute to in less disturbed environments? With increasing urbanization at a global level, sustainable use and management of urban soils is needed in order to maximize the ecosystem services these soils are able to provide. We analyze urban microbial communities using metagenomic approaches coupled with next generation DNA sequencing. Our lab also studies the infectious mechanism of the plant pathogen, Agrobacterium tumefaciens.