Tao Pan received his Ph.D. from Yale University, did his postdoc at University of Colorado at Boulder, and has been a faculty at the University of Chicago since 1994. He has broad interests in RNA biology, RNA structure and folding. His current interests focus on functional genomics and biology of tRNA, and the dynamic epitranscriptome of RNA modifications. In microbiome research, his lab is applying the demethylase-tRNA-seq approach, an efficient and quantitative tRNA-seq method developed in his lab, for microbiome investigations. His lab is also working on microbiome-host interactions through RNA modifications in the host cells that depend on the microbiome activity.