Sean Jungbluth

I’m a professional scientist, explorer, and tinkerer. My work sits at the intersection of environmental biology, microbial genomics, oceanography, low-cost instrumentation, and computational tools for understanding life at large scales. I’m PI/Group Lead at the Estuary & Ocean Science Center at San Francisco State University, where I study biodiversity and microbial life across marine, estuarine, deep-sea, subsurface, and other hard-to-sample environments.

I’m especially interested in making advanced biological measurement cheaper, more reproducible, and more useful outside a narrow set of well-funded labs. My research and tool-building have used eDNA, metabarcoding, genomics, machine learning, field sampling, and open data standards to connect physical samples with biological identity and ecological context.

That same motivation shows up in my current hands-on projects. Through BioKEA, I’ve been working on tools like BugPicker, which adapts open-source pick-and-place automation to image, sort, and array insect specimens for DNA barcoding. The goal is practical: lower the cost and labor required to catalog biodiversity, while keeping the link between specimen, image, plate position, and sequence data traceable.

For this project, I’m bringing that same approach to hyperspectral biology: start with a concrete biological background, build a low-cost instrument, publish the design and data, and make the work useful to other researchers. More about my background is at https://seanjungbluth.me/.

July 2026