He obtained a B.A. from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California-San Francisco with John Sedat, and did a postdoctoral fellowship in Andrew Murray’s lab at Harvard University, where he developed a suite of fungal-algal mutualisms that serve as the basis for his lab’s current work. The Hom lab is generally interested in distilling rules for how microbes symbiose or interact in a persistent fashion and form stable communities that perform specified functions, particularly as they relate to how microbial symbioses first form and evolve and the role of the physicochemical environment in influencing these processes. Members of the lab currently work on projects ranging from fungal-algal mutualism and symbiosis, the chemical ecology of marine cyanobacterial polycultures, sloth-microbe symbioses, and the microbial ecology of fermented beverages.