Dr. Kostas Konstantinidis is the Richard C. Tucker Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences (adjunct) at Georgia Tech and Program Faculty for the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He earned his BS (1999) in Agricultural Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and his PhD (2004) from the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, under the supervision of James Tiedje. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2007, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT under the supervision of Ed DeLong. Dr. Konstantinidis has published ~240 peer-reviewed articles in the areas that he performs research in, which have received in excess of 42,000 citations (Google Scholar). Accordingly, he has made the top 1% of world's Highly Cited scientists and engineers list by Clarivate/Web of Science since 2020. He has received several distinctions and awards for his work, including to be an elected member of the honorary American Academy of Microbiology (ASM), and a 2025-2026 ASM Distinguished Lecturer. See also lab website for further details at: http://enve-omics.gatech.edu
The overarching goal of Dr. Konstantinidis’ research is to advance understanding of how microorganisms adapt to human-induced environmental perturbations and to cause disease. He is also interested in biotechnological applications of microbial diversity in the bioremediation of environmental pollutants and the assessment of water quality. The great majority of microorganisms resists cultivation in the laboratory and thus, cannot be studied efficiently. Therefore, another major objective of Dr. Konstantinidis’ research program is to develop novel culture-independent (aka metagenomics and metatranscriptomics) approaches and the associated bioinformatics tools to study microbial communities in-situ, in both natural (e.g., terrestrial or marine) as well as human-associated (e.g., wastewater treatment plants, the human gut) systems. The bioinformatics tools are made freely available online through a dedicated webserver (https://enveomics.scigap.org) for analysis of microbial genomic and metagenomic data by external users, and for educational purposes. Currently, >3,000 users per month use this webserver. Dr. Konstantinidis’ research has addressed several pressing questions in these areas such as what is a microbial species and how species evolve, and provided biomarkers for fecal pollution tracking and biodegradation of important contaminants. Accordingly, he is considered a world leader in the fields of microbiome engineering and genomics. More details on active research projects in the lab are provided through the lab website (https://enve-omics.gatech.edu/ongoing-projects/).
| Post-doc | M.I.T | 08/2005-08/2007 |
| Post-doc | Michigan State University | 01/2005-07/2005 |
| Ph.D. | Michigan State University | 2004 |
| B.S. | Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece | 1999 |
Dr. Konstantinidis has developed new graduate and undergraduate courses that fulfill critical needs in the curriculum of Environmental Engineering, and more specifically, the intersection of microbiology with environmental biotechnology and engineered systems, such as #3 below. He frequently teaches the following courses with notable success based on student exit interviews and ratings, as well as students’ success in finding jobs and internships in industry and academia:
Selected Publications (out of 240 in total; *denotes student/postdoc advisee) Up-to-date citation statistics for Dr. Konstantinidis are also available on Web of Science.
Bacterial and other microbes are thought to evolve primarily through binary fission, meaning asexual reproduction. Using a novel bioinformatic method for detecting gene transfer, researchers tested their hypothesis for how species emerge and are maintained. They found that bacteria evolve and form species more “sexually” than previously thought.
Professor Kostas Konstantinidis co-led a study to investigate natural divisions in bacteria with a goal of determining a scientifically viable method for organizing them into species and strains.There has never been a reliable method to cohesively organize bacteria in this way—a problem for researchers since bacteria make up roughly 75% of all living species on Earth.
