Bill Metcalf is the G. William Arends Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the complex chemistry that bacteria perform, including the biogenesis of methane and specialized natural products. Prof. Metcalf advises MicroMGx on the use of comparative genomics to identify the regions of the bacterial genome that are responsible for specialized metabolism, and on the use of advanced genome sequencing technologies.