Jeff Gore

About

Jeff Gore is a Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the emergent dynamics of complex communities, integrating experiment and theory to explore how interactions within populations or communities lead to rich emergent phenomena. His research focuses on laboratory microcosms to understand the loss of stability, chaotic fluctuations, alternative stable states, community assembly, and the spread of 'cheater' strategies. He has demonstrated key theoretical predictions about community stability and fluctuations through experimental work with microbial populations, including the effects of environmental modifications such as pH on microbial interactions. Gore's work on alternative stable states and tipping points has provided insights into ecological transitions, with experiments measuring early warning indicators like critical slowing down and spatial pattern emergence. His research also investigates how community composition shifts in response to environmental changes, using pairwise competition outcomes to predict species survival and community dynamics. Additionally, Gore studies the evolution of cooperation, showing how cooperative yeast populations can coexist with cheaters due to preferential access to resources, and extends these concepts to antibiotic resistance. Recently, he has explored the physics of learning in neural networks, aiming to understand the origin of neural scaling laws and the dynamics of high-dimensional training…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Ecology
• Microbiology
• Biology
• Evolutionary biology

Selected publications

• Strength of species interactions determines biodiversity and stability in microbial communities

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2020-02-10 · 657 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emergent phases of ecological diversity and dynamics mapped in microcosms

  Science · 2022-10-06 · 323 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  From tropical forests to gut microbiomes, ecological communities host notably high numbers of coexisting species. Beyond high biodiversity, communities exhibit a range of complex dynamics that are difficult to explain under a unified framework. Using bacterial microcosms, we performed a direct test of theory predicting that simple community-level features dictate emergent behaviors of communities. As either the number of species or the strength of interactions increases, we show that microbial e…

  PublisherDOI

• Cooperative growth in microbial communities is a driver of multistability

  Nature Communications · 2024-06-03 · 55 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Microbial communities often exhibit more than one possible stable composition for the same set of external conditions. In the human microbiome, these persistent changes in species composition and abundance are associated with health and disease states, but the drivers of these alternative stable states remain unclear. Here we experimentally demonstrate that a cross-kingdom community, composed of six species relevant to the respiratory tract, displays four alternative stable states each dominated…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Slow expanders invade by forming dented fronts in microbial colonies

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 41 citations

  Most organisms grow in space, whether they are viruses spreading within a host tissue or invasive species colonizing a new continent. Evolution typically selects for higher expansion rates during spatial growth, but it has been suggested that slower expanders can take over under certain conditions. Here, we report an experimental observation of such population dynamics. We demonstrate that mutants that grow slower in isolation nevertheless win in competition, not only when the two types are inte…

  PublisherDOI

• Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2025-01-06 · 34 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The outcomes of ecological invasions may depend on either characteristics of the invading species or attributes of the resident community. Here we use a combination of experiments and theory to show that the interplay between dynamics, interaction strength and diversity determine the invasion outcome in microbial communities. We find that the communities with fluctuating species abundances are more invasible and diverse than stable communities, leading to a positive diversity-invasibility relati…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Environmental modulation of microbial conflict and cooperation

  NIH · $2.3M · 2013–2022

• NIH Grant K99GM085279

  NIH · $90k · 2010

• CAREER: Exploration of Evolutionary Dynamics on Rugged Fitness Landscapes

  NSF · $600k · 2011–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Carlos Bustamante

  University of California, Berkeley

  49 shared

• Christoph Ratzke

  University of Tübingen

  48 shared

• Alfonso Pérez‐Escudero

  Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier

  44 shared

• Hyun-Seok Lee

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  44 shared

• Matthieu Barbier

  Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement

  38 shared

• Martina Dal Bello

  Living Systems (United States)

  38 shared

• Zev Bryant

  Stanford University

  36 shared

• Daniel R. Amor

  Université Sorbonne Paris Nord

  35 shared

Labs

• Gore LaboratoryPI

Awards & honors

• Schmidt Science Polymath Award (2020)
• Allen Distinguished Investigator Award
• NIH New Innovator Award
• Sloan Foundation Fellowship
• NSF Career Award

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Janet Conradh-205
• Hong Liuh-160
• Isaac Chuangh-90