Having IMPACTT 2021 Symposium

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Having IMPACTT 1:
Advancing Microbiome Research

Virtual Symposium
June 14-16, 2021

About this event

The Integrated Microbiome Platforms for Advancing Causation Testing and Translation (IMPACTT),
the International Microbiome Centre (IMC) and the University of Calgary are organizing a microbiome symposium;

“Having IMPACTT: Advancing Microbiome Research.”

This microbiome symposium is of interest to researchers, clinicians, and trainees from across Canada and internationally.
The importance of human microbiome research is rapidly gaining momentum for understanding its role in human health and disease. Our goal for this symposium is to bring together the leading minds in microbiome research and highlight the emerging microbiome teams from across Canada. We will introduce you to IMPACTT: A pan-Canadian inter-disciplinary research core based out of the University of Calgary, designed to advance Canadian microbiome research. IMPACTT leverages the world-class resources provided by the International Microbiome Centre, also located at the University of Calgary. From causation testing to translational studies, our leads and other world-class researchers will share their findings about how our microbes shape our health and how to harvest our microbes to improve the well-being for people and animals around the world. The themes covered in this symposium include microbiome impacts throughout life in both health and chronic diseases, such as cancer, inflammation, and autoimmunity.

Program

See & Download the Full Program

Confirmed Chairs and Speakers

CHAIRS

Dr. Kathy McCoy
IMPACTT Director, Chair

Dr. Brinkman Fiona IMPACTT lead Computational development for multi-omic linkages platform 5

Dr. Fiona Brinkman
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

Dr. Markus Geuking IMPACTT Lead Education and Training platform

Dr. Markus Geuking
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

Dr. Celia Greenwood IMPACTT Lead Computational development for multi-omic linkages platform 5

Dr. Celia Greenwood
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

Dr Philippe Gros IMPACTT Lead Gnotobiotic facility

Dr. Philippe Gros
IMPACTT Co-Lead, Chair 

Dr Joe Harrison IMPACTT lead Microbial and human tissue repositories

Dr. Joe Harrison
IMPACTT Co-Lead, Chair

Dr. William Hsiao IMPACTT Lead Computational development for multi-omic linkages platform 5

Dr. William Hsiao
IMPACTT Co-lead, Chair

Dr Anita Kozyrskyj IMPACTT Lead Cohort Analysis & Design

 Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

Dr. Paul Kubes - IMPACTT Lead Gnotobiotic platform

 Dr. Paul Kubes
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

Dr. Ian Lewis IMPACTT lead Functional Omics platform 4

Dr. Ian Lewis
IMPACTT Co-Lead, Chair

Dr Karen Madsen IMPACTT lead Microbial and human tissue repositories

Dr. Karen Madsen
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

Dr. Braedon McDonald IMPACTT Lead Education and Training platform

Dr. Braedon McDonald
IMPACTT Co-Lead, Chair

Dr. Diego Silva IMPACTT Lead Ethics Platform

Dr. Diego Silva
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

Dr. Laura Sycuro IMPACTT lead Functional OMICS platform 4

Dr. Laura Sycuro
IMPACTT Lead, Chair

SPEAKERS

Keynote

Dr. Allegretti Jessica

Dr. Jessica Allegretti
Keynote Speaker
Insights into success and failure of FMT in IBD

Dr Jun Huh

Dr. Jun R Huh
Speaker
Immune modulatory roles of the microbial metabolites of bile acids

Dr. Jennifer Wargo

Dr. Jennifer Wargo
Speaker
The role of the gut and tumor microbiome in cancer

Plenary

Dr Marie-Claire Arrieta IMPACTT Lead Cohort Analysis & Design

Dr. Marie-Claire Arrieta
IMPACTT Lead, Speaker
Microbiome alterations in prematurity

Dr. Robert Beiko

Dr. Robert Beiko
Speaker
Searching for antimicrobial resistance in metagenomic data – hits and misses

Dr. Adam Burgener

Dr. Adam Burgener
Speaker
The vaginal microbiome in infection, inflammation, and cancer

Dr. Jayne Danska Sex & Gender Champion

Dr. Jayne Danska
Speaker
Microbiome Regulation of Beta-Cell Autoimmunity and Type 1 Diabete

Dr. Kieran O'Doherty

Dr. Kieran O’Doherty
Speaker
Do ethical insights imply an obligation to act: the case of microbiome stewardship

Dr. John Parkinson

Dr. John Parkinson
Speaker
Pathogen-Microbiome Dynamics on Maternal Nutrition During Pregnancy

Dr-Jonathan-Peled-portrait

Dr. Jonathan Peled
Speaker
Microbiome and Bone Marrow Transplantation

Dr. Bertrand Routy

Dr. Bertrand Routy 
Speaker
The gut microbiome to overcome cancer immunotherapy resistance

Dr. Fernando Forato Anhe

Dr. Fernando Forato
Speaker
Microbiome Regulation of Beta-Cell Autoimmunity and Type 1 Diabetes 

Dr. Padmaja Subbarao

Dr. Padmaja Subbarao
Speaker
Causational Roles of the Gut Microbiome in Childhood Asthma

Dr. Carolina Tropini

Dr. Carolina Tropini
Speaker
Physical perturbations to the gut microbiota

Dr. Bruce Vallance

Dr. Bruce Vallance
Speaker
Role of pathobiont microbes in IBD: From discovery, through causation, to novel treatments

ABSTRACTS

Short Talks Selected From Abstracts

Heather Armstrong
Marina Costa Fujishima
Amanda Zucoloto
Leyuan Li
Chris Tang

Poster Presentations Selected From Abstracts

Nazanin Arjomand Fard
Sahar Bagheri
Michael Bording-Jorgensen
Isabelle Bordeau Julien
Kirsty Brown
Daniel Casteneda Mogollon
Yuanyao Chen
Nicole Cho
Noah Cooke
Thibault Cuisiniere
Sonia Czyz
Marcela Davoli-Ferreira
Vanessa DeClercq
Sharon F Dong
Vanessa Dumeaux
Kyle Flannigan
Hans Ghezzi
Mackenzie Gutierrez
Roy Hajjar
Genelle Healey
Aline Ignacio
Manon Oliero
Carmen Tessier
Jenine Yee
Van A Ortega
Rahgavi Anand-Poopalarajah
Robyn J Wright
Shaelen Konschuh
Thomas Louie
Emily M Mercer
Deanna M Pepin
Jenny Mannion
Kevin McGregor
Ali Mirza
Shirin Moossavi
Hanan Musa
Christopher N Andrews
Jacob Nearing
Shannon Pyke
Jared Schlechte
Anshul Sinha
Ricardo Suarez
Mariia Taguer
Carolyn Thomson
Albina Tskhay
Erik Van Tilburg Bernardes
Kirsten Wilson
Nadia Yorke
Xin Zhao

Poster Presentations Selected From Abstracts

Poster guidelines

How and where do I share my research?

Posters will be presented as a short slideshow; you will not be asked to provide a traditional poster as that format is not the best for a virtual platform.  

To share your research, our virtual event platform, Whova will provide you with a virtual poster booth.

What will be visible in my poster booth?

  • Your contact information including: First and Last Name, Academic status, and Affiliation
  • A cover slide
    • The first slide of your slideshow presentation
    • 800px x 450px (Max 1000px x 1000px)
    • JPEG format
  • Your abstract
    • 5000 character maximum
    • Please include the title and author list at the top
  • Poster slideshow
    • 5 slides including the front slide – should take up to 3 min to present, detail here.
    • PDF format
    • Maximum of 10MB
  • Live chat

Your poster booth must have all files uploaded by Sunday, June 7th, 2021.  

How do I set up my booth?

If you have completed registration as requested, you will receive an email on Tuesday, May 25th from Whova that will give you access to your virtual poster booth and provide guidance to set it up. If you have any questions, please contact Cassandra at [email protected]

When do I share my research?

During one of the poster sessions, attendees will have the opportunity to join you in a Zoom breakout room where you will be able to present and discuss your research.

You will receive the date of your poster session and your breakroom number a few days before the symposium. It is important to remember this information for the event.

The breakout rooms will be accessible via the main session on the agenda.

At the beginning of each poster session, attendees will be prompted to select the breakout rooms they want to join. By clicking on your breakout room number, you will join your meeting room where the live session will take place.

During your live session, have your presentation shared on screen. As at an in-person event, attendees joining you might ask you to present your slides, this should take up to 3min, and want to discuss your research. Attendees will be able to come in and out of these breakout rooms to visit multiple posters.

Your poster booth will be available to attendees from June 9th to August 13th, 2021 and you can update the details as many times as needed during this period.

Poster slideshow

  • Requirements:
    • Up to 5 slides including the introductory slide
    • No animations or movements
    • 16:9 aspect ratio
    • Feel free to use PowerPoint, Google Slides or another program as long as it can be saved as a PDF
    • Maximum file size of 10MB
    • Duration of the presentation: 3 min. maximum

The chat

Attendees can reach out to you at any time on your booth to ask questions via the chat. Messages are visible to all attendees and are saved on the platform for up to three months after the event. Please note: no notifications are sent to the poster presenter when a new chat message is being posted, we recommend that poster presenter check their chat regularly.

Poster awards

There will be three awards

  • One for People’s choice that will be selected based on attendees’ favorite choice
  • Two from our judging committee.

People’s choice

Attendees will be able to visit your poster booth and rate your poster anonymously. The posted with the highest score will receive the “Best Poster People’s Choice award”.

Judges Choice

A first selection will be done between June 8th and June 10th. All posters will be judged based on their uploaded slideshow. Judges will look for clarity, visual appeal, and relevance of the research for the microbiome field. 

A second selection will take place during the poster sessions, where our judges will meet you in your poster booth. Judges will look for the flow of the discussion and the Q&A.

Prizes will be disclosed on the day they will be awarded.

Q & A for Poster Presenters

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Dr. Kathy McCoy

Chair - Dr. McCoy

Director & IMPACTT platform 1 lead,  professor Kathy McCoy obtained her PhD in Immunology from the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, Otago University, Wellington, New Zealand. She performed her postdoctoral studies and was a junior group leader at the Institute of Experimental Immunology in Zürich, Switzerland. In 2006 she joined McMaster University as an Assistant Professor where she held a Canada Research Chair in Mucosal Immunology. From 2010 – 2016 Kathy McCoy was an Assistant Professor in Mucosal Immunology in the Department of Clinical Research, University of Bern in Switzerland. In Sept. 2016, she returned to Canada as a Professor in the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, and the director of the International Microbiome Center. There she continues her research on host-microbial interactions with a focus on early life. Kathy McCoy is interested in the interplay between the gut microbiota and the immune systems both innate and adaptive. Using germ-free and gnotobiotic mouse model, her research group aims to understand how exposure to intestinal microbes in early life, educates and regulates the development of the immune system and how this impacts susceptibility to immune-mediated diseases such as allergy and autoimmunity.
Dr. Brinkman Fiona IMPACTT lead Computational development for multi-omic linkages platform 5

Chair - Dr. Fiona Brinkman

Fiona Brinkman is a Distinguished Professor in Bioinformatics and Genomics at Simon Fraser University, most known for R&D of widely used software that aids more integrative, systems-based analyses of microbe and human genomics/transcriptomics data. She leads CHILDdb data integration, to enable more integrative analysis of diverse CHILD Cohort Study data, including microbiome data, and she co-leads development of the IRIDA platform, which is now used as the primary platform for Canada’s Public Health Agency to track infectious disease outbreaks using combined epidemiological, lab and genomics/metagenomics data. She co-coordinates two large consortiums, involving researchers from 15 countries, enabling better genomic data sharing in an ethical framework. She has a strong interest in developing more preventative, sustainable approaches for disease control, using microbiome data as a sentinel for animal or ecosystem health, and also in bioinformatics education and mentoring young scientists. She is on several committees and Boards, including Chairing the Scientific Advisory Board for the European Nucleotide Archive. Her awards include a TR100 award from MIT, Thompson Reuters “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” and High Cited Researcher, and most recently she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Dr. Markus Geuking IMPACTT Lead Education and Training platform

Chair - Dr. Markus Geuking

Dr. Markus Geuking, IMPACTT Education lead, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary‘s Cumming School of Medicine. He is a member of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases as well as of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases. Dr. Geuking obtained his PhD in Immunology from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Switzerland) where he worked in the lab of Nobel Prize Laureate Prof. Rolf Zinkernagel. He started to work on host-microbial immune interactions using germ-free and gnotobiotic models during his postdoctoral studies at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada). He then continued this work as a research associate at the University of Bern (Switzerland) before joining the University of Calgary in 2016. Markus Geuking has over 30 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Science and Immunity. He received the AbbVie IBD Grant (2015), Lutz Zwillenberg Award (2012), and Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Grant (2010).
Dr. Celia Greenwood IMPACTT Lead Computational development for multi-omic linkages platform 5

Chair - Dr. Celia Greenwood

Dr. Celia Greenwood, IMPACTT platform 5 lead, is Senior Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, QC, Canada, and James McGill Professor at McGill University. As a statistician, she focuses her research on developing and applying statistical methodology for analysis of genetic and genomic data. Recent methodological work focuses on dimension reduction and prediction with high dimensional data, analysis of DNA methylation data, and data integration. Applications of her methods have been used to improve understanding of multiple phenotypes and diseases, including osteoporosis, rheumatic diseases, cognitive ability, and cancer. Dr. Greenwood is also the Graduate Program Director of the new doctoral program “Quantitative Life Sciences” at McGill. She is a co-Director of the Ludmer Centre for Neuro informatics and Mental Health at McGill University, focusing on integration of brain imaging, genetic, and epigenetic data to better understand mental health. From 2015 to 2017, she served on the Board of Directors of the International Genetic Epidemiology Society and is now the President of it.
Dr Philippe Gros IMPACTT Lead Gnotobiotic facility

Chair - Dr. Philippe Gros

Dr. Philippe Gros obtained his Ph. D. in Experimental Medicine from McGill University and following post-doctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital and MIT, joined the Department of Biochemistry at McGill in 1985, where he has been a full Professor since1994. He is a member of the Center for the Study of Host Resistance, the Goodman Cancer Research Center, is the Director of the Complex Traits Program and is the Vice-Dean (Health Research) of the Faculty of Medicine at McGill. His main area of investigation concerns the genetic analysis of susceptibility to infections, pre-disposition to neural tube defects, and models of carcinogen-induced cancer. Dr. Gros has been an International Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Distinguished Scientist of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a James McGill Professor. He has received the Wilder Penfield Prize for Health Sciences (Prix du Quebec), the Canada Council Killam Prize for Health Research, and is a fellow of the Royal Society ofCanada. Dr. Gros acts as an advisor for several organizations, including the Burroughs Well come Fund and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Gros is experience in the biotechnology sector, including co-founder of PhageTech, and Emerillon Therapeutics (Xenon).
Dr Joe Harrison IMPACTT lead Microbial and human tissue repositories

Chair - Dr. Joe Harrison

Dr. Joe J. Harrison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary (U of C). Harrison is passionate about microbiology, genetics and biochemistry, and seeks to better understand chronic infectious diseases and to devise new ways to defeat them. Harrison holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Biofilm Microbiology and Genomics. He is a member of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases and is the chair of the Biofilm Research Group at the U of C. He is a co-lead for Integrated Microbiome Platforms for Advancing Causation Testing and Translation (IMPACTT), which is the CIHR Canadian Microbiome Core. During his PhD, Harrison had a lead role in developing and commercializing the MBECTM assay, which is used for biofilm antimicrobial susceptibility testing. This technology was commercialized to create a spinoff company acquired in 2006 by Innovotech Incorporated, which is now listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Dr. William Hsiao

Chair - Dr. William Hsiao

Dr. William Hsiao is a chief bioinformatician at the Public Health Microbiology & Reference Laboratory where he leads the effort of applying microbial genomics and bioinformatics in public health diagnostic and reference laboratory since 2011. He completed his PhD at Simon Fraser University under Dr. Fiona Brinkman’s supervision and a post-doctoral fellowship in Dr. Claire Fraser’s laboratory at the Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine. His current research focuses on developing bioinformatics applications and using next generation sequencing technologies to study microbial pathogens and microbiomes. He has participated in several genomic and metagenomic projects and is currently leading the effort to develop a bioinformatics platform to use whole genome sequencing to facilitate public health infectious disease outbreak investigations. This will be achieved by integrating data from genomic sequencing, clinical records, laboratory test results, and epidemiological investigations using semantic web technologies. Overall, his research aims to improve our understanding of the pathogens that make us sick and the microbiota that keep us healthy.
Dr Anita Kozyrskyj IMPACTT Lead Cohort Analysis & Design

Chair - Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj

Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj is the IMPACTT platform 2 lead & Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is PI of the SyMBIOTA (Synergy in Microbiota) research program on environmental shaping of the infant gut microbiome, and development of child overweight and atopic disease in the CHILD(Canadian Healthy Infant LongitudinalDevelopment) birth cohort study. SyMBIOTA was funded by one of 7 team grants from the first CIHR Microbiome Initiative in 2010. Dr. Kozyrskyj’s SyMBIOTA program has generated 40 papers and 2 book chapters. Her first infant gut microbiota paper on cesarean delivery (CMAJ 2013;185) received the 2014 CMAJ Bruce Squires Award for the most influential publication. Her findings on infant gut microbiota and food sensitization (Clin Exp Allergy 2015;45) were presented to the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Food Allergy. She is associate editor of the Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disesase editorial board and was co-editor of the 2016 special issue on “The Gut Microbiome and Immunity: How it is Shaped in Early Life.”

Dr. Paul Kubes - IMPACTT Lead Gnotobiotic platform

Chair Keynote Address #1 - Dr. Paul Kubes

Dr. Paul Kubes is a Professor at the University of Calgary, Cumming School of Medicine and is the Founding Director of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases. He also holds a Canada Research Chair in Leukocyte Recruitment in inflammatory disease. Dr. Kubes has received numerous awards including the CIHR Investigator of the Year in 2011 for his science work on how the brain affects immunity. He has also received the Alberta Science and Technology Award and the Henry Friesen Award. Dr. Kubes researches are broad and impactful going from publications in high impact journals such as Cell, Science and Nature journals to clinical journals such as The Lancet and translational journals (JCI). His latest work has uncovered a key role for peritoneal cavity macrophage in healing visceral organ. He has done work for CIHR having been part of numerous review committees a member of CIHR Governing Council and is presently chair of the college chairs. He is on the editorial board of JCI and JEM and co-chaired the Gairdner Research Committee.

Dr. Ian Lewis IMPACTT lead Functional Omics platform 4

Chair - Dr. Ian Lewis

Dr. Ian Lewis, is an Assistant Professor and Alberta Innovates Translational Health Chair in Metabolomics at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. Lewis earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed his postdoctoral training at Princeton University. He was recruited by UCalgary to launch a research program that harnesses state-of-the-art technology to detect and combat infectious diseases. As a part of this program, Lewis built the Calgary Metabolomics Research Facility (CMRF), an analytical lab that specializes in unravelling the complex host-pathogen metabolic interactions that occur during infections. Recently, he partnered with Calgary Laboratory Services to launch a suite of new diagnostic tools and treatment practices that may significantly reduce the number of people who die from infections.
Dr Karen Madsen IMPACTT lead Microbial and human tissue repositories

Chair - Dr. Karen Madsen

Dr. Madsen is the IMPACTT platform 3 lead and Professor of Medicine at the University of Alberta. She is Director of the “Center of Excellence for Gastrointestinal Inflammation and Immunity Research (CEGIIR)”.  After receiving her BSc (Hon) and MSc degrees in Biochemistry at the University of Manitoba, she completed a PhD degree at the University of Calgary in the area of gastrointestinal physiology. The primary focus of her research is the relationships between the host and its resident microbiota, with specific interests in the role of microbes in inflammatory bowel diseases and metabolic disorders.  The goal of her research program is to gain a mechanistic understanding of environmental and dietary influences on host-microbial interactions in order to design effective therapies to treat human disease based on manipulation of the gut microbiome. She is carrying out both clinical and basic research studies using dietary interventions, fecal microbial transplantation, and probiotic/ prebiotic therapy to treat metabolic disorders and inflammatory bowel disease along with mechanistic studies to examine how the host responds to microbial manipulation.   
Dr. Braedon McDonald IMPACTT Lead Education and Training platform

Chair - Dr. Braedon McDonald

Dr. Braedon McDonald, M.D., Ph.D., FRCPC (Int Med), FRCPC (Crit Care). Dr. McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Critical Care Medicine at theUniversity of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, and member of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases. Dr. McDonald earned a degree in microbiology and immunology at McGill University, followed by an MD and PhD in immunology at the University of Calgary. He completed residency training in Internal  Medicine at the University of British Columbia, and then returned to the University of Calgary to complete subspecialty fellowship training in adult Critical Care Medicine, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship in microbiome research with Dr. Kathy McCoy at the International Microbiome Centre. His research program focuses on translational and discovery science in the area of microbiome-immune interactions in infection and critical illness, combining germ-free/gnotobiotic mouse models with high-resolution multi-dimensional immune analysis including in vivo(intravital) imaging and mass cytometry. 
Dr. Diego Silva IMPACTT Lead Ethics Platform

Chair - Dr. Diego Silva

Dr. Diego S. Silva, IMPACTT Ethics Committee lead, is a Lecturer at Sydney Health Ethics at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His research focuses on the intersection of ethics, political theory, and public health, including microbiome research. Diego has held grants as Principle Investigator from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and Genome BC. His peer-reviewed publications have appeared in top bioethics journals (e.g., Journal of Medical Ethics, Public Health Ethics, Bioethics), as well as highly-rated medical journals (e.g., Lancet, CMAJ). In 2016, Diego was awarded Mark S. Ehrenreich Prize in Healthcare Ethics Research by the International Association of Bioethics and the University of Southern California for the best paper in that year’s World Congress of Bioethics. Diego graduated in 2013 with a PhD in public health from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, while also holding and MA and BA (Honours) in philosophy from the University of Toronto.

Chair - Dr. Laura Sycuro

Dr Laura Sycuro, IMPACTT platform 4 lead, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Infectious Diseases, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Obstetrics & Gynaecology. Dr Laura Sycuro is also one of the principal investigators of a new Albertan initiative that aims to understand how the maternal microbiome, both in pregnancy and in the early stages of microbial transmission to a newborn, impacts the lifelong health of children.
The broad goal of her research program is to harness the microbiome to promote maternal and child health. Her lab is working to advance the precision with which we define the composition of the microbiome and mechanistically link its species, strains, and genes to health outcomes. This work is unfolding in two directions:1) Technology development that deepens our understanding of the microbiome’s pan-genomic content and fluidity 2) Identification of important genes that are funnelled into interdisciplinary functional studies. Her lab is also part of a collaborative team investigating how new vaccines that modulate the upper respiratory tract (URT) microbiota by preventing common, yet potentially pathogenic bacteria from colonizing, affect the ecology and stability of the community.
Dr. Allegretti Jessica

Keynote Speaker - Dr. Jessica Allegretti

Dr. Jessica Allegretti is a gastroenterologist and serves as the Associate Director of the Crohn’s and Colitis Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she leads the Clinical Trials Program. She also serves as the hospital’s Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Program Director. Dr. Allegretti’s research focuses on the intestinal microbiome and the consequences of its derangement, with the goal of understanding the role dysbiosis plays in microbial associated diseases, with a particular interest in C. difficile infections (CDI) and its effect on patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Additionally she has lead several clinical trials investigating the role of FMT in other chronic diseases including obesity and primary sclerosis cholangitis.

Dr Marie-Claire Arrieta IMPACTT Lead Cohort Analysis & Design

Speaker - Dr. Marie-Claire Arrieta

Dr. Marie-Claire Arrieta is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Physiology, Pharmacology and Pediatrics of the University of Calgary. Her research examines the interactions between the early-life gut microbiome and the infant’s immune system. Her research program is framed around a translational approach, in which samples collected from children undergoing clinical care or enrolled in a birth cohort studies are used to characterize the microbial alterations (dysbiosis) associated with asthma and asthma risk. Her research group also examines the causality and mechanistic underpinnings of these associations in well-established mouse models of allergic airway inflammation, placing her work at the interface between clinical studies and experimental animal work.
As an advocate of science communication to the public, Dr. Arrieta has written a best-selling public book, Let Them Eat Dirt, and is involved in several science communication initiatives within Canada and abroad, including public talks, a second book and a documentary film project.
Dr. Jayne Danska Sex & Gender Champion

Speaker - Dr. Jayne Danska

Dr. Jayne Danska, IMPACTT Sex & Gender champion, was raised in New York City, and educated in the United States at Kenyon College, Cornell University and Stanford University. She holds The Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Molecular Medicine, is a Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto with appointments in the Departments of Immunology, and Medical Biophysics.  Her research is focused on defining the mechanisms underlying immune-mediate diseases and application of this knowledge to improve their diagnosis, prevention and treatment.  Her lab works on the genetic and environmental causes of autoimmune disease, particularly Type 1 diabetes (T1D), the molecular mechanisms of acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL), and innate immune surveillance of blood cancers. She leads multi-disciplinary projects that analyses to identify the roles of genes environmental factors in the rising rates of autoimmune diseases, specifically to understand how the intestinal microbiome modifies inherited risk of autoimmunity using rodent models and longitudinal studies of at-risk children. Her work is also focused on the impact of sex as a key determinant of autoimmune diseases, many of which are far more prevalent in females. Dr. Danska and her collaborators also discovered an immune signaling pathway pivotal to the survival of human hematopoietic stem cells and leukemia stem cells that sustain leukemic growth. They have developed a biologic therapy to manipulate this axis to impair the survival of leukemia and other blood cell cancers that is now in clinical trials. Dr. Danska has an active research training program within her research group.  She serves and chairs grant panels, and is co-executive lead of the Chairs of College of Reviewers at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Dr. Bruce Vallance

Speaker - Dr. Bruce Vallance

Professor Bruce Vallance established his laboratory at BC Children’s Hospital in 2003 to study the role played by gut bacteria in driving the intestinal inflammation that characterizes enteric infections and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Since then, Dr. Vallance has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed manuscripts, and is internationally recognized for his research on disease-causing bacteria, as well as exploring the mechanisms by which intestinal epithelial cells defend against these microbes. His research has been recognized through a series of awards, including the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology Young Investigator (2007) and Research Excellence awards (2016). He was also named a Michael Smith Foundation in Health Research Scholar (2004), held a Canada Research Chair in Pediatric Gastroenterology (2004-2014) and now holds the endowed CH.I.L.D. Foundation Research Chair in Pediatric Gastroenterology. Dr. Vallance has recently established a new microbiome profiling core (Gut4Health) at BC Children’s Hospital. He is also currently co-leading a CIHR Team grant seeking to identify gut bacterial pathobionts within pediatric IBD patients and develop new therapeutic approaches that will target these microbes.