Speakers

Rob Knight is the founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and Professor of Pediatrics, Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego. He is the Wolfe Family Endowed Chair in Microbiome Research. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Microbiology. He was honored with the 2019 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for his microbiome research and received the 2017 Massry Prize, often considered a predictor of the Nobel. He is the author of “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes” (Simon & Schuster, 2015), coauthor of “Dirt is Good: The Advantage of Germs for Your Child’s Developing Immune System (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), and written over 900 scientific articles. He spoke at TED in 2014 which is viewed over 2.2 million times. His lab has produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline (cited over 50,000 times as of this writing) and UniFrac (cited over 15,000 times including its web interface). He is co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project, the American Gut Project, and the company Biota, Inc., which uses DNA from microbes in the subsurface to guide oilfield decisions. His work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease, has enhanced our understanding of microbes in environments ranging from the oceans to the tundra, and made high-throughput sequencing techniques accessible to thousands of researchers around the world.

Sarah Lebeer is a professor of microbiology at the University of Antwerp, where sheleads research on host-microbe interactions with a particular focus on lactobacilli and their potential in promoting human health. Her team integrates genomics, ecology and functional microbiology to explore innovative microbiome‑based applications.

Petra Bacher holds a full professorship for Immunology at Kiel University, Germany. She received her PhD in Immunology from the University Jena in 2014. The Bacher lab has a strong interest in human microbe-specific CD4+ T cell responses and aims at understanding their contribution to chronic inflammation. Our recent work demonstrates that TCR cross-reactivity is a key modulator of microbe-reactive T cell responses in health and disease, and that in particular fungal microbes play an important role in driving inflammatory CD4+ T cell reactivity in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases.

Dr. Konnikova's team focuses on the development of early life immunity particularly at barrier sites such as the GI tract and the maternal-fetal interface with a particular focus on T cell biology. Using multi-omic approaches, the group investigates how mucosal homeostasis is developed and what contributes to pathogenesis of diverse diseases such as sepsis, preterm labor, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), very early onset (VEO) and pediatric IBD. The Konnikova lab is further interested in how the microbiome and the associated metabolome regulate immune development and homeostasis at barrier sites. Her group is also interested in how early life events alter circulating immune cells. To this end, in collaboration with the NOuRISH team they are enrolling infants in a longitudinal study of peripheral blood development.

Jonathan Swann is a Professor of Biomolecular Medicine within the School of Human Development and Health in the Faculty of Medicine. He is responsible for leading a metabolomics-based research programme to understand the influence of gene-environment interactions on the mammalian metabolic system and their implications for health and disease. His primary research interests fall under two intersecting research themes: Role of the gut microbiota (the collection of microbes residing in the gastrointestinal tract) in the mammalian supra-organism and their influence on host health and disease. Impact of early-life events and exposures on human development particularly microbial-host interplay, metabolism, and phenotypic outcomes.

Her lab investigates host/microbiome interactions with a focus on host genetic effects on the gut microbiome and the role of microbial transfers between social partners.

Arnau Vich Vila (PhD) is a computational biologist and postdoctoral researcher at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). He earned a Master’s degree in bioinformatics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and completed his PhD in Groningen (The Netherlands), where he investigated the gut microbiome and its significance in health and disease, with a particular interest in gastrointestinal diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Arnau has also made significant contributions to comprehending the factors that shape gut microbiota composition, investigating influences from diet and medication through extensive population cohorts such as the LifeLines cohort in the Netherlands and, currently, the Flemish Gut Flora Project in Belgium. Additionally, his current scientific interests involve exploring the role of the gut microbiota in food intolerances and delving into the metabolic implications of the small intestinal microbiota.