brantley hall

Brantley Hall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland. His lab studies electron flow in the human gutmicrobiome, which leads to a surprisingly funny topic: flatulence, which is predominantly caused by the outputs of gut microbial metabolism. He co-invented a wearable biosensor that measures hydrogen and other gases in flatus, enabling the first continuous, long-term monitoring of gut microbial activity outside the lab. He envisions a future where intestinal gas can be reduced through rational modulation of the microbiome. He believes flatulence is a key unmeasured dimension of human physiology, and that quantifying it will unlock new understanding of the gut-brain axis, digestion, how humans perceive their own digestive processes, and eventually the diagnosis and treatment of digestive diseases. He trained as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and earned his PhD in Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology from Virginia Tech.

TEDxDavenport Talk:
What a Million Farts Can Teach Us
Flatulence is produced almost entirely by the gut microbiome and carries real information about digestion and gut health, but it has never been measured at scale. To change that, Brantley Hall and his team built a wearable biosensor and launched the Human Flatus Atlas, a study mapping gut microbial gas production across thousands of people. In this talk, he shares what the Human Flatus Atlas is beginning to reveal, and why measuring a million farts could meaning fullyadvance our understanding of digestion, the gut-brain axis, and human health.