Tal Korem, PhD

  • Assistant Professor of System Biology and Reproductive Sciences (in Obstetrics and Gynecology)

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Overview

Tal Korem, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Systems Biology and Obstetrics & Gynecology. He is a member of Columbia’s Program for Mathematical Genomics (PMG), and was previously a CIFAR-Azrieli global scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Academic Appointments

  • Assistant Professor of System Biology and Reproductive Sciences (in Obstetrics and Gynecology)

Credentials & Experience

Education & Training

  • BSc, 2012 Medicine, Summa Cum Laude, Tel Aviv University
  • PhD, 2017 Computational Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science

Honors & Awards

  • 2020: Roy and Diana Vagelos Precision Medicine Award, Columbia University
  • 2019 - 2021: CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholarship
  • 2016: Lee A. Segel Memorial Prize in Theoretical Biology

Research

The Korem Lab focuses on the development of computational methods that identify and interpret host-microbiome interactions and their application in various clinical setting. The ultimate goal of his research is to translate microbiome findings to clinical care, with microbiome-based therapeutics and microbiome-informed clinical practices. He has developed several approaches for microbiome data analysis, inferring microbial growth rates, structural variants, contamination and experimental bias; and has applied these methods in diverse clinical and biological investigations, most notably for personalization of dietary treatment and predicting preterm birth.

Selected Publications

  1. Austin GI, Park H, Meydan Y, Seeram D, Sezin T, Lou YC, Firek BA, Morowitz MJ, Banfield JF, Christiano AM, Pe’er I, Uhlemann A-C, Shenhav L, Korem T. Contamination source modeling with SCRuB improves cancer phenotype prediction from microbiome data. Nat Biotechnol. 2023 Dec; 41(12):1820-1828. PMCID: PMC10504420.
  2. Kindschuh WF, Baldini F, Liu MC, Liao J, Meydan Y, Lee HH, Heinkey A, Thiele I, Thaiss CA, Levy M, Korem T. Preterm birth is associated with xenobiotics and predicted by the vaginal metabolome. Nature Microbiology. 2023 Feb;8(2):246-259. PMCID: PMC9894755.
  3. Liao J, Shenhav L, Urban JA, Serrano M, Zhu B, Buck GA, Korem T. Microdiversity of the vaginal microbiome is associated with preterm birth. Nat Commun. 2023 Aug 17;14(1):4997. PMCID: PMC10435516.
  4. Joseph TA, Chlenski P, Litman A, Korem T, Pe’er I. Accurate and robust inference of microbial growth dynamics from metagenomic sequencing reveals personalized growth rates. Genome Res. 2022 Mar 5; 32(3):558-568. PMCID: PMC8896461.
  5. Coleman I, Korem T. Embracing Metagenomic Complexity with a Genome-Free Approach. mSystems. 2021 Aug 31;6(4):e0081621. doi: 10.1128/mSystems.00816-21. PMCID: PMC8407213.
  6. Bar N*, Korem T*, Weissbrod O, Zeevi D, […], Lotan-Pompan M, Weinberger A, Le Roy C, Menni C, Visconti A, Falchi M, Spector T, Adamski J, Franks P, Pedersen O, Segal E. A reference map of potential determinants for the human serum metabolome. Nature. 2020 Nov 11. PMID: 33177712.
  7. Zeevi D*, Korem T*, Godneva A, Bar N, Kurilshikov A, Lotan-Pompan M, Weinberger A, Fu J, Wijmenga C, Zhernakova A, Segal E. Structural variation in the gut microbiome associates with host health. Nature. 2019 Apr;568(7750):43-48. PMID: 30918406.
  8. Zeevi D*, Korem T*, Zmora N*, Israeli D*, Rothschild D, Weinberger A, Ben-Yacov O, Lador D, Avnit-Sagi T, Lotan-Pompan M, Suez J, Mahdi JA, Matot E, Malka G, Kosower N, Rein M, Zilberman-Schapira G, Dohnalová L, Pevsner-Fischer M, Bikovsky R, Halpern Z, Elinav E, Segal E. Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses. Cell. 2015 Nov 19;163(5):1079-1094. PMID: 26590418.
  9. Korem T*, Zeevi D*, Suez J, Weinberger A, Avnit-Sagi T, Pompan-Lotan M, Matot E, Jona G, Harmelin A, Cohen N, Sirota-Madi A, Thaiss CA, Pevsner-Fischer M, Sorek R, Xavier R, Elinav E, Segal E. Growth dynamics of gut microbiota in health and disease inferred from single metagenomic samples. Science. 2015 Sep 4;349(6252):1101-1106. PMCID: PMC5087275

For a complete list of publications, please visit PubMed.gov