Lucas Cohen

Papers

Total Citations

244

H-Index

About

Lucas Cohen is a pioneering microbiologist whose work sits at the intersection of automation, machine learning, and microbial ecology. His primary research focuses on developing high-throughput methods to culture and characterize previously uncultivable bacteria from complex microbiomes. Cohen’s landmark 2023 paper, “High-throughput microbial culturomics using automation and machine learning,” has already garnered 244 citations, reflecting its transformative impact on the field. In this work, he introduced a scalable platform that integrates robotic liquid handling, image-based colony phenotyping, and deep learning to isolate and link bacterial genotypes to their metabolic functions—a breakthrough that overcomes the long-standing bottleneck of labor-intensive, low-throughput culture techniques. Beyond this, Cohen has contributed to the design of automated workflows for gut and soil microbiome analysis, enabling researchers to access pure cultures for mechanistic studies. His achievements include receiving the Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Microbial Ecology and securing multiple grants for open-source culturomics tools. For students and researchers, Cohen’s work exemplifies how computational and robotic approaches can unlock the hidden diversity of the microbial world, accelerating discovery from bench to biotech.