Speakers
2025 GMFH Summit

	Katherine Amato PhDDr. Amato is a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University studying the influence of gut microbes on host ecology and evolution. Her research examines how diet affects the gut microbiota as well as how changes in the gut microbiota impact host nutrition, energetics, and health. She uses non-human primates as models for studying host-gut microbe interactions in selective environments and for providing comparative insight into the evolution of the human gut microbiota.
	Ashwin Ananthakrishnan MBBS, MPHDr. Ashwin Ananthakrishnan is the Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Crohn’s and Colitis Center and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. At Massachusetts General Hospital where he is involved in clinical care of complex patients with IBD, research, and teaching. He has been involved in NIH-funded investigations to define the role of environment on IBD, and in personalizing IBD. He has published over 300 manuscripts and has co-authored two textbooks in IBD in addition to serving on editorial boards of multiple journals. He is a member of the International Organization for the Study of IBD (IOIBD) and current serves as the Chair of the IMIBD section of the AGA.
	Marie-Claire Arrieta PhD Dr. Marie-Claire Arrieta is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Physiology and Pharmacology, and Pediatrics at the University of Calgary. Her research studies the how the millions of microbes that inhabit an infant’s gut (the early-life gut microbiome) contributes to human health or disease. Her research program conducts clinical and experimental research, aiming to understand the mechanisms behind host-microbiome interactions.
	Benoit Chassaing PhDDr. Benoit Chassaing obtained his PhD in microbiology at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (France), identifying factors involved in the virulence of adherent and invasive Escherichia coli strains (pathovar involved in the etiology of Crohn’s disease). He then joined Georgia State University to work on various subjects related to mucosal immunology, trying to decipher how genetic and environmental factors can perturb intestinal microbiota composition in a detrimental way, leading to intestinal inflammation.Currently professor at Institut Pasteur / INSERM, his laboratory focus on understanding how environmental factors are involved in shaping detrimental microbiota, with a particular focus on intestinal inflammation and metabolic deregulations.
	Karine Clement MD, PhDKarine Clément (MD, PhD) is medical doctor, full professor of Nutrition at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital and Sorbonne University in Paris. Since 2002, her research unit at INSERM works on the pathophysiology of obesity and related disorders particularly focusing on interorgan cross-talks including the involvement of the gut microbiota (www.nutriomique.org, @ClementLab).
	Lawrence David PhDDr. Lawrence David is an Associate Professor in Duke University’s Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and Associate Director of the Duke Microbiome Center. His research focuses on the relationships between diet, the gut microbiome, and human health, as well as developing innovative tools at the intersection of nutrition and microbiology. Dr. David received his Ph.D. from MIT and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard before joining Duke. His work has earned him recognition as one of ScienceNews’ “10 Scientists under 40 to watch” and research support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Searle and Fulbright Scholars Programs, and the Arnold & Mabel Beckman, Hartwell, Alfred P. Sloan, Damon Runyon, and Chan Zuckerberg Foundations.
	Emmanuel Mongodin Emmanuel F. Mongodin, PhD earned his PhD in 2000 from the University of Reims-Champagne-Ardenne in France, where he studied the mechanisms of adherence of Staphylococcus aureus in the airway epithelium. Following his PhD, Dr. Mongodin completed his postdoctoral training initially at VCU (Richmond, VA), then at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR ; Rockville, MD) and at the J. Craig Venter Institute (Rockville, MD). Dr. Mongodin was later recruited to the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 2007, before joining the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in 2020 as a Program Director in the institute’s Division of Lung Diseases (DLD). At NHLBI, Dr. Mongodin oversees a large portfolio of grants focused on the lung response to pulmonary infections, lung transplantation, effects of the microbiome and virome on the host, and co-infections and co-morbidities associated with HIV/AIDS.
	Andrew Gewirtz, PhDAndrew Gewirtz, Regents’ Professor and Distinguished University Professor at Georgia State University, the highest academic rank in the University Systems of Georgia. He earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1996 from Boston University School of Medicine. He did postdoctoral studies at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/HMS and Emory University, where he later served on faculty from 2000-2011 prior to moving to GSU. He specializes in research on innate immunity, microbiome, intestinal inflammation and obesity/diabetes. Inflammation plays a central role in many disease states, and his goal is to understand the normal mechanisms by which pro-inflammatory signals protect against microbes and discern how they go awry in disease states. Dr. Gewirtz has published over 100 articles in this area and serves on numerous review panels.
	KC Huang PhDKC Huang was an undergraduate Physics and Mathematics major in Page House at Caltech, and spent a year as a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University working with Dr. Guna Rajagopal on Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of water cluster formation. He received his PhD from MIT working with Prof. John Joannopoulos on electromagnetic flux localization in polaritonic photonic crystals and the control of melting at semiconductor surfaces using nanoscale coatings. During a short summer internship at NEC Research Labs, he became interested in self-organization in biological systems, and moved on to a postdoc with Prof. Ned Wingreen in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton working on the relationships among cell shape detection, determination, and maintenance in bacteria. His lab is currently situated in the departments of Bioengineering and Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford, and his current interests include cell division, membrane organization, cell wall biogenesis, and the organizational principles of bacterial communities. He has been director of the Biophysics Graduate Program since 2015, and the chair of the DEI committee for the Aspen Center for Physics board.
	Abigail Johnson PhD, RDAbigail Johnson is an Assistant Professor and Registered Dietitian in the Division of Epidemiology & Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. She is the Associate Director of the Nutrition Coordinating Center, which distributes and supports the Nutrition Data System for Research (NDSR). Dr. Johnson has diverse experiences in nutrition research, ranging from molecular biology and clinical nutrition to bioinformatics and public health. Her other research explores the relationships between diet and the human gastrointestinal tract microbiome in health and disease – specifically in prediabetes and cancer. Dr. Johnson uses novel computational methods to integrate dietary data with multi-omics data. Her research has demonstrated that daily changes in dietary intake and overall dietary patterns are reflected in shifts in microbial composition in humans, and that diet-microbiome relationships are personalized. Dr. Johnson completed her undergraduate B.S. degrees in Nutrition and Biology and received a Ph.D. in Nutrition from the University of Minnesota.
	Chenhao Li PhDDr. Chenhao Li is a computational biologist who received his Ph.D. in computer science from National University of Singapore. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow from Dr. Ramnik Xavier’s lab, where he focuses on studying the metabolic interactions between the gut microbiome and the host. He is also interested in a broad range of technical and biological questions, including developing methods for emerging sequencing technologies, characterizing the spatial
	Carrie Daniel MacDougall, PhD, MPHI conducted my graduate training in Atlanta at Emory University and the American Cancer Society, where I earned an MPH in Epidemiology and then an interdisciplinary PhD in Nutrition and Health Science. Following a post-doctoral fellowship in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the NCI, I joined the faculty at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in the summer of 2012. At MD Anderson, I enjoy working with a team of medical oncologists, surgeons, dietitians and laboratory scientists to address research questions from every angle, in clear view of the clinical implications. Building on my epidemiologic discoveries of diet-related risk and protective factors in large, prospective cohorts of healthy individuals followed for the development of cancer, my current projects target diet, obesity, and the microbiome to improve patient outcomes. Leading MD Anderson’s Bionutrition Research Core I also support multiple dietary assessment protocols, controlled human feeding studies and dietary intervention trials throughout the institution.
	Jonathan (Tsoni) Peled PhDAfter undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois, MD/PhD studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Jonathan Peled did a heme/onc fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and in 2016 joined the Adult Bone Marrow Transplantation Service in the Department of Medicine of MSKCC, where he serves as an Assistant Attending. He launched an independent laboratory in 2022 where he and his research team focus on the mechanisms by which commensal bacteria modulate host immunity, specifically within the context of cancer immunotherapy, including allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation. His laboratory is part of Memorial Hospital Laboratories and he holds a secondary appointment in the Human Oncology Pathogenesis Program (HOPP). He also serves as the Associate Director of the MSKCC Center for Hematological Malignancies.
	Geoff Preidis MD, PhDGeoffrey A. Preidis, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, is a board-certified Pediatric Gastroenterologist with basic and translational research expertise in nutrition-sensitive mechanisms that regulate intestinal and liver physiology, growth, and development. Based at Texas Children’s Hospital, which contains the largest neonatal intensive care unit in the United States, Dr. Preidis explores how the intestinal microbiome develops in extreme prematurity and how probiotics might be used to reduce the risk of necrotizing enterocolitis, sepsis, feeding intolerance, growth failure, and death in this vulnerable population. His biomedical research career began during undergraduate studies at Harvard University. He developed an interest in Neonatal Gastroenterology while in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Baylor College of Medicine. He completed internship and residency training in Pediatrics, as well as fellowship training in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition, at Baylor College of Medicine.
	Barbara Rehermann MDDr. Barbara Rehermann is Chief of the Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch, NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. She received an M.D. degree and the Venia Legendi for Immunology from Medizinische Hochschule, Hannover, Germany, and pursued clinical training in the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at the same university, and postdoctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA. Dr. Rehermann’s research focusses on the immunological factors that contribute to inflammatory diseases such as viral hepatitis and the regulation of immune responses and metabolism by the microbiome. This includes translational immunology studies with well-characterized patient cohorts, animal models such as laboratory mice with wild mouse microbiota and in vitro studies. Dr. Rehermann is an elected fellow of German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Society for Microbiology and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and a member of the American Association of Immunologists. She currently serves as associate editor of Journal of Hepatology, consulting editor of Journal of Clinical Investigation and editorial board member of the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Journal of Virology. Her work was honored with national and international awards including the Pettenkofer Award, the Loeffler-Frosch Award of the German Society for Virology, and NIH Bench-to-Bedside, Salzman awards and Director awards. She has trained more than 60 postdoctoral fellows and students, most of whom now hold academic positions in the US, Asia and Europe.
	June Round June Round, PhD trained in immunology at UCLA and conducted her postdoc studies at Caltech with Sarkis Mazmanian studying how a polysaccharide on B. fragilis could induce immune tolerance and protect from intestinal disease. She opened her own lab in Sept. 2011 at the University of Utah studying the interaction between the immune system and the microbiota. Her lab utilizes microbiology, immunology, bioinformatics and mouse models of disease to study this relationship. While most people view our interactions with microbes through the lens of pathogenesis, most human interactions with microbes result in benign or even beneficial reactions. Thus, the goal of the research in the Round lab is to uncover the relevant microbes that confer these benefits and understand the mechanistic underpinnings of these relationships so that we can harness the power of the microbiota for therapeutics.
	Bernd Schnabl MDDr. Schnabl is a trained gastroenterologist and physician-scientist. He is Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Diego and the founding Director of the NIH-supported San Diego Digestive Diseases Research Center (SDDRC). He earned his MD degree from the University of Freiburg in Germany. After finishing his residency in internal medicine, he completed a gastroenterology fellowship at Columbia University in New York City. His research focus is to understand the complex multi-directional interactions that occur between the gut microbiota and the liver. Dr. Schnabl has published over 240 papers and was listed by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate as one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (top 1%) in 2019, 2021-22. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).
	Robert (Chip) Schooley MDDr. Schooley is a Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. He completed medical school and an internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins and infectious disease fellowships at the NIH and Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1981. His longer-term research efforts are directed at the pathogenesis and therapy of RNA virus infections. He has been heavily involved in the development of antiviral chemotherapy directed at HIV, HCV and the herpesgroup viruses as well as in research, teaching and infrastructure building efforts in sub-Saharan Africa. Following his successful treatment of a multidrug resistant A. baumannii infection in a fellow faculty member at UC San Diego, he has become interested in the use of viruses as therapeutic agents – namely the use of bacteriophages to treat multidrug resistant bacterial infections. He currently serves as Co-Director of UC San Diego’s phage research center (the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, IPATH).
	Bjoern Schroeder PhDBjörn Schröder is a group leader at The Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS) at Umeå University, Sweden, and studies the interaction between diet, gut microbiota and the intestinal mucosal barrier. His group combines dietary interventions in mice and humans with gut microbiota analyses, microbiota transplantations, and state-of-the-art ex vivo mucus measurements. More information: www.mucubacter.org.
	Cynthia Sears Cynthia L. Sears, M.D. is Professor of Medicine, Oncology and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Microbiome Program Leader of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute of Cancer Immunotherapy, the Director of the Germfree Murine Core and Co-Director of the Microbiome Forum at Johns Hopkins. Through translational and bench research stemming from her training as an infectious diseases specialist and physician scientist, she investigates how enteric bacteria and the microbiome promote colon carcinogenesis and modulate cancer immunotherapy responses. Primary goals of the Sears laboratory are to understand how individual bacteria and communities contribute to oncogenesis, providing opportunities to contribute to colon cancer prevention and immunotherapy therapeutic success. She has long been an active member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), serving as President of IDSA in 2019, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, the flagship journal of the IDSA.
	Andrea Merchak Andrea Merchak, Ph.D. is a Gator Neuroscholar Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Florida. She obtained her B.S. at Centre College with a focus on behavioral neuroscience and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. There, her thesis work explored the link between the gut microbiota and the brain in mood disorders and multiple sclerosis. Her current work explores the relationship between gut health and genetic predispositions for neurodegeneration. She will be transitioning to the Stark Neuroscience Research Institute at Indiana University in Indianapolis in March of 2025 as an Assistant Professor of Neurology where she will continue her work exploring the interaction between the gut microbiota and the brain.