Dr. Hallam is a University of California Santa Cruz and MIT trained molecular biologist, microbial ecologist, entrepreneur, and innovator with over 20 years of experience in field and laboratory research at disciplinary interfaces. He is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, former Canada Research Chair in Environmental Genomics and a program faculty member in the Bioinformatics and Genome Sciences and Technology training programs.
At UBC Steven directs the Ecosystem Services, Commercialization Platforms and Entrepreneurship (ECOSCOPE) innovation ecosystem consisting of an NSERC CREATE training program, a research network and a core facility for high-throughput screening that integrate across microbial ecology, biological engineering, data science, and networking and entrepreneurship research and training pillars.
His current research emphasizes the creation of functional screens and computational tools that reveal hidden metabolic powers of uncultivated microbial communities. In 2016 he co-founded Koonkie Cloud Services to provide scalable software and analytics solutions to public and private sector partners.
Steven is a UBC Killam Teaching Prize recipient and a strong advocate for the Scholarship of Education Leadership. In 2017 he launched the Experiential Data Science for Undergraduate Cross-disciplinary Education (EDUCE) project with support from the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund to build progressive data science competency in the Microbiology and Immunology curriculum.
In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for distinguished contributions to the fields of environmental genomics and microbial ecology. More recently he became a Leopold Leadership Fellow and Peter Wall Scholar in Residence.