Jacob Mills

I distinctly remember saying to a friend during undergrad that there was NO WAY I’d work on microbes or urban ecology – I wanted to be out on the land where I grew up, conserving and restoring the plants and critters from generations of poor land managers in the area. Then I met Martin and Nick. They had a soil microbiome project for me to do in my final year of undergrad, they’d never done it before and either had I. But it hooked me. The tiny-enormous world of microbes is CRAZY. They keep everything alive through symbiotic processes, they manipulate behaviour from increased risk taking to sugar eating (did I just hear Robert Sapolsky say free will doesn’t exist?), and fitting with part of my own ethos – they recycle. Another big part of my ethos is personal, community, and planetary health and the more I read the more I firmly believe that looking after our own, and the environments, microbiome is the only lifestyle choice we need to make for long and healthy lives. This comes down to biodiversity - the great promoter of microbial, dietary, and lifestyle diversity. So here I am, in the midst of a global urban public health crisis strongly linked to poor microbiomes, researching the interactions between microbes, plants, and humans in urban spaces with the aim of restoring health at all levels of the biosphere, through Microbiome Rewilding.