Exploring the Connections that Sustain Life
My work advances a One Health vision: the health of people, animals, food, soil, and the microbial world cannot be separated.
My Story
My story starts on a tarmac in Miami in 1962, one of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children who left Cuba through Operation Peter Pan. I was sixteen, and I arrived with more questions than answers about how a country loses so much so quickly, questions I wouldn't find real footing for until decades later, in a laboratory.
I've spent much of my career since chasing biological resilience wherever it turned up: in 45-million-year-old amber, where I isolated microorganisms, in the soil of working farms, in the guts of Inca mummies and the Iceman Ötzi. Along the way I founded two companies built on the same idea, that biological systems, given the right conditions, recover.
That idea is also the center of Unseen Hunger, the book I've been writing: a look at how soil health, food quality, and the human gut are one connected system, and why that connection matters more than most of us realize.
I'm a professor emeritus at Cal Poly, founder and CEO of Ancient Organics Bioscience, and chief scientific officer at Chauvell. But mostly, I'm still the sixteen-year-old who left Cuba with a question, and spent a career trying to answer it.
Discovering the Unseen
Microorganisms preserve histories invisible to the naked eye. I have spent decades investigating what ancient and modern microbial communities can reveal about life, health, resilience, and change.
One Connected Microbiome
One Health begins with a simple premise: the health of people, animals, plants, soil, food, and ecosystems are interconnected. My work examines the microbial networks that link these systems and how restoring those connections can support healthier lives and a healthier planet.
Science into Solutions
I translate microbiome science and this One Health perspective into practical innovation: building companies, developing biological products, and collaborating on new approaches to human, animal, plant, and soil health.