Researching Rob Knight

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Prior to entering politics, Knight was a park ranger. He contested the newly created seat of Daly in the 2001 election against Country Liberal Party (CLP) candidate Tim Baldwin (who had represented the now-abolished seat of Victoria River, which had been redistributed to form Daly), but was unsuccessful.

He contested Daly again at the 2005 election after Baldwin retired, and was initially thought to have little chance of winning. Daly was a fairly safe CLP seat on paper; after a redistribution, the CLP held it on a notional majority of 9.5 percent. However, on election night the CLP primary vote almost halved, and Knight gained the seat with a swing of 24.6 percent, turning Daly from a safe CLP seat into a safe Labor seat at one stroke. Knight actually won a majority on the first count, allowing him to take the seat from the CLP without the need for preferences. Even considering the size of the Labor wave that swept through the Territory, Knight's victory was considered a shock result, as a swing of this magnitude is almost unheard of at any level in Australia.

Knight was reelected in 2008, but was defeated in 2012 by the CLP's Gary Higgins amid Labor's collapse in the remote portions of the Territory.

Knight completed a BSc in biochemistry at the University of Otago and a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University in 2001, where his thesis was "The Origin and Evolution of the Genetic Code." Until 2014, he was a professor at the University of Colorado – Boulder.

He did an IAmA on Reddit and co-taught an online microbiome course on Coursera. He gave a TED Talk in 2014 on the role microbes play on our health. Later this idea was expanded into the book Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes, written with science journalist Brendan Buhler and published by Simon & Schuster.

In 2015, he received the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science.

Rob Knight has the prologue and a chapter dedicated to his spirit of exploration in a non-fiction, written for masses, science book ‘I Contain Multitudes’. The author Ed Yong highlights his visit to San Diego zoo with Knight where he swabs different animals to study the microbes collected. He explains the intriguing nature of the microorganisms and the way the affect development of life. The book was published in 2016.