Hello! My name is Elizabeth McDaniel and I am a scientist turned founder building at the intersection of fermentation science, functional ingredients, and human microbiome health. I’m the CSO and co-founder of Groat Bio, a fermented functional ingredients company with the goal of making the health benefits of fermented foods accessible.
I was previously a computational biologist at Microcosm Foods, a research organization previously funded by the Astera Institute, working towards making the benefits of fermented foods accessible to all through open datasets and novel products. Before I was a computational scientist at Arcadia Science, where I created computational tools and workflows for harnessing the evolutionary biology of diverse organisms across the tree of life for developing novel therapeutics, and contributed to pubs released through a non-journal based publishing platform.
I received my PhD in the Microbiology Doctoral Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying lab-scale enrichment systems simulating phosphorus removal using multi-omics techniques. Prior to moving to industry, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia in the Departments of Civil Engineering and Microbiology and Immunology working on the microbial ecology of anaerobic digestion systems.
You can find more information about my work, what I’m writing about, and how to get in contact with me!