Dan Knights is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Colorado, with a certificate in Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology and a focus on computational biology and machine learning. In general, he is interested in using machine learning and computational statistics to answer important questions in biology, genomics, and engineering. His current research focus is the predictive modeling of complex microbial communities using multi-source high-throughput sequencing data, with applications in personalized medicine, early diagnosis of disease, and biofuel production. He has co-authored 16 journal publications during his graduate studies, including two papers in Science. His projects have received international media attention, and have been declared "must-read" by the Faculty of 1,000, listed in Cell Host & Microbe's "Most Read Articles", and selected runner-up for the Science "Breakthrough of the Year". He has been the expert witness on National Public Radio's "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!", and was the official 2003 Rubik's Cube World Champion.