Charles Kollmer is a historian of microbiology, biotechnology, and biomedicine. His research focuses on how humans have repurposed living things as tools in industry, agriculture, medicine, and science, and how this shaped scientific knowledge of life. Currently, Kollmer is the Ahmanson Postdoctoral Instructor in History of Biology at the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech. Kollmer’s PhD dissertation, “From Elephant to Bacterium: Microbial Culture Techniques and Chemical Orders of Nature, 1875–1946,” is a history of how microbial culture techniques recast nature’s order in chemical terms.