Rob Edwards began his 30+ year bioinformatics career during a PhD in microbial genetics from the University of Sussex, England. Later, as a postdoc, Edwards compared all the sequenced Salmonella genomes (five of them) to show that prophages were the key differences between Salmonella strains that infect different animals. Edwards is at the forefront of metagenomics and microbiome bioinformatics, developing new computational approaches to identify phages from metagenomes, and developing new bioinformatics approaches to identify and annotate complete phage genomes. Edwards wet-lab isolates phages, develops new approaches to extracting DNA and RNA phages, and builds synthetic phages from scratch.