Roberto Kolter

Chimileski and Kolter were also advisors and contributed imagery for Invisible Worlds at the Eden Project, a permanent exhibition sponsored by the Welcome Trust. Their still and time-lapse imagery was featured in the Bacterial World Exhibition at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 2018, and in the World Unseen: Intersections of Art and Science at the David J. Sencer CDC Museum in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019.

As Professor Emeritus, Kolter has continued his involvement in science by communicating microbiology to scientific and general audiences. Since 2016, Kolter has been co-blogger (with Moselio Schaechter) of the popular microbiology blog, Small Things Considered. From 2014 to 2018, Kolter and Scott Chimileski developed two exhibitions at the Harvard Museum of Natural History: World in a Drop, open in 2017, and Microbial Life, open through 2020. In parallel, Chimileski and Kolter wrote the book Life at the Edge of Sight: A Photographic Exploration of the Microbial World (Harvard University Press, 2017). During a 2018 interview at EAFIT University in Colombia, Kolter explained that he is “in a more contemplative phase of his career," adding that he is enjoying "being able to exercise a little more the 'Ph' (Philosophy) of my PhD".

Another body of research stemmed from work on biofilms in the Kolter group in collaboration with the laboratory of Richard Losick: the discovery that subpopulations of different functional cell types develop within single-species biofilms of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis. Some cells were found to express genes for motility, others for sporulation, cannibalism, surfactant production or the secretion of extracellular matrix. Some cell types were found localized in clusters in different physical locations and time points during biofilm development. Another study from the group in 2015 showed that collective behaviors like group migration across a surface can emerge due to interactions between multiple cell types.

From 2014 through 2018, Kolter and Scott Chimileski spearheaded two public exhibitions at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. World in a Drop: Photographic Explorations of Microbial Life was an artistic exhibition that featured imagery produced through Chimileski and Kolter's collaboration, and was open from August 2017 to January 2018. Subsequently, Microbial Life: A Universe at the Edge of Sight opened in February 2018 as major special exhibition supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Kolter and Chimileski are guest curators of Microbial Life and the exhibition remains open until March 2020. These exhibitions have traveled internationally at the Eden Project in the UK and EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia, among other locations.

Kolter is an advocate and participant in the communication of microbial science to early career microbiologists and non-scientific audiences. His work in this area began during his term as Co-Director of the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative from 2003 to 2018. In this role, Kolter organized an annual public lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts on topics of general relevance, such as microbial foods and drinks like cheese, sake and wine. His work in science communication then intensified in the years leading up to his retirement and now as an Emeritus professor through invited lectures, writing and museum projects.

Kolter has a long record of teaching at Harvard University and at international summer courses. At Harvard he taught Biofilm Dynamics and he is currently developing a Massive Open Online Course with HarvardX on fermentation and microbial foods. He is a regular instructor at the Microbial Diversity Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the EMBO-FEBES summer microbiology course in Spetses, Greece and the John Innes/Rudjer Bošković Summer School in Applied Molecular Microbiology in Dubrovnik, Croatia. In 2000, he received the ASM International Professorship Award.

Kolter has been the cover editor of the Journal of Bacteriology since 1999 and was previously on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science, mBio, and eLife.

In the 1990s, Kolter's group began to focus on the regulation and genetic components of surface-associated communities of bacteria called biofilms. Before then, biofilms had been discovered and were studied in the context of biofouling and in engineering solutions to prevent biofouling, but the genetics of biofilm formation was unexplored and most microbiologists did not view biofilm formation as a physiological process of bacterial cells. The lab went on to discover major regulatory systems underpinning biofilm development and characterized key materials within the extracellular matrix of biofilms using model species like Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae, and Bacillus subtilis. Microbial biofilms have since become a major field of microbiology, recognized as a predominant lifestyle of microbes in nature, with relevance to medicine and infections caused by pathogenic bacteria.

Roberto Kolter is Professor of Microbiology, Emeritus at Harvard Medical School, an author, and past president of the American Society for Microbiology. Kolter has been a professor at Harvard Medical School since 1983 and was Co-director of Harvard's Microbial Sciences Initiative from 2003-2018. During the 35-year term of the Kolter laboratory from 1983 to 2018, more than 130 graduate student and postdoctoral trainees explored an eclectic mix of topics gravitating around the study of microbes. Kolter is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Microbiology.

The research activities of Kolter's laboratory at Harvard Medical School from 1983 to 2018 encompassed several major parallel lines of investigation and spanned many interrelated subfields of microbiology. The overarching theme of the laboratory was to use genetic approaches to study physiological processes (and associated emergent properties) that bacteria have evolved to respond to stressful conditions in the environment, like starvation or limited nutrients, or as a result of ecological interactions with other living organisms. The eclectic nature of Kolter's research program was also a result of his policy of encouraging postdoctoral scientists to explore independent interests. In an interview with Nature in 2015, Kolter was quoted on this mentorship style: "I let postdocs explore what they want to explore, as long as it is within the sphere of my interest."

As a new faculty member at Harvard Medical school in the 1980s, Kolter's research group made use of Escherichia coli as a model organism for understanding the molecular genetics of antibiotic biosynthesis. During the course of this work the group was among the first to characterize ABC exporters, today known to be one of the most important membrane protein systems that move molecules across the cell membrane.

In the late 1980s, Kolter's research group became interested in bacteria living in the stationary phase of the growth cycle, a state more like the natural conditions that bacteria experience in environments outside of the laboratory. The group discovered regulatory systems exclusive to cells in this non-growing state and found that mutants with greater fitness in stationary phase evolved and rapidly took over the cultures. The Zambrano et al. paper in 1993 which published this finding was one of the earliest examples of evolution occurring in the laboratory, or experimental evolution.

Kolter was born and raised in Guatemala. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1975 and a PhD in Biology from the University of California, San Diego in 1979. He was then a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University with Charles Yanofsky from 1980 to 1983. Kolter joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor in 1983, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989, Professor in 1994, and became Professor Emeritus upon his retirement from running a research laboratory in 2018.

As a graduate student, Kolter's research provided early evidence for what was called the "replicon hypothesis," proposed by Jacob, Brenner and Cuzin in 1962. His work defined an origin of DNA replication that led to the development of many suicide cloning vectors still in use today.