Welcome Jarrad Hampton-Marcell, Bridge-to-Faculty Program Scholar!
Jarrad Hampton-Marcell is a member of the inaugural cohort to the Bridge-to-Faculty (B2F) program scholars at UIC. B2F is a new faculty recruitment program designed to attract underrepresented postdoctoral scholars with the goal of a direct transition to a tenure-track junior faculty position after two years. This recruitment initiative aims to attract and retain promising scholars to UIC as well as diversify our faculty, with particular emphasis on departments with low or no presence of faculty who are underrepresented in their field.
Jarrad is a former microbial ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory who specializes in microbial ecology focusing on host-microbe interactions and their influence on human health. Jarrad has played a significant role in furthering the understanding of how microbial taxa are influenced by human-associated and environmental factors that influence human-health and their built-environments via consortiums such as Earth Microbiome Project, Hospital Microbiome Project, and American Gut Project. Jarrad’s latest research explores the relationship between exercise and the gut microbiome uncovering the functional roles microbial-derived energy-producing bacteria play. Jarrad combines next-generation sequencing with machine learning to identify underlying associations in order to develop targeted experimental approaches.
Jarrad is a local product of the University of Illinois school system receiving his BS (Molecular and Cellular Biology) and MS (Integrative Biology) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and PhD from University of Illinois at Chicago (Ecology and Evolution). Jarrad is actively involved in outreach serving as co-lead for Argonne’s ACT-SO High School Research Program which has provided independent research opportunities for more than 250 African-American High School students in the Chicagoland area (https://blogs.anl.gov/aaa-erg/act-so/). He also serves as the Director of Athlete Research for the HEROH Foundation, a non-profit sports performance program who have assisted in developing more than 500 scholarship athletes across Chicago. Jarrad spends a majority of his free time coaching youth sports, speaking to high school students about being a minority in STEM, or spending time with his wife and children.
More information about the B2F program can be found here.