Having IMPACTT 3:
Advancing Microbiome Research
July 10-12, 2023
Speaker Profiles
Keynote Speakers
Barbara Rehermann, MD
National Institutes of Health, USA
Dr. Barbara Rehermann is Chief of the Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch, NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland USA. The goal of her research is to better understand the immunological factors that contribute to inflammatory diseases such as viral hepatitis, to assess how immune responses and chronic inflammation are regulated by the microbiome and to devise strategies that modulate the progression of chronic liver disease and/or induce protective immune responses. Her laboratory performs translational immunology studies with biospecimens from well-characterized patient cohorts, and established preclinical mouse models with natural microbiota to evaluate how hepatic and systemic immune responses are regulated by the microbiome. Her work was honored with national and international awards including the Pettenkofer Award, the Loeffler-Frosch Award of the German Society for Virology, the NIH Bench-to-Bedside and Salzman awards and the NIH Director award.
Dr. Rehermann received an M.D. degree and the Venia Legendi for Immunology from Medizinische Hochschule, Hannover, Germany. She completed a clinical residency and fellowship in the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at the same university, and a postdoctoral research fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA prior to joining the National Institutes of Health. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. She served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Immunology and is currently Associate Editor for the Journal of Hepatology, Consulting Editor for The Journal of Clinical Investigation and an editorial board member for the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Journal of Virology. She has trained more than 55 postdoctoral fellows and students, many of whom now hold academic positions in the US, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Japan.
Petter Brodin, MD/PhD
Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Petter Brodin is Garfield Weston Chair and Professor of pediatric immunology at Imperial College London and professor of Pediatric immunology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. The Brodin lab (https://brodinlab.com/) develops and applies novel experimental and computational methods to describe human immune system variation with a particular interest in the immune systems of children, its development early in life, and its role in health and disease during childhood.
After completing a MD/PhD program at the Karolinska Institute, Brodin joined the Mark M Davis’s laboratory at HHMI, Stanford University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow, investigating the contribution of heritable and non-heritable sources of variation in immune systems of twins (Brodin et al, Cell, 2015). Following this, Brodin returned to Sweden to establish a national facility for immunomonitoring at the Swedish infrastructure hub, Science for Life Laboratory. He also established his own research program applying systems-immunology methods to the study of immune system development early in life. The Brodin lab established a birth cohort and showed differences in early life adaptation between preterm and term infants (Olin et al, Cell, 2018), the global repertoire of maternal antiviral antibodies (Pou et al, Nat. Med, 2019) as well as the imprinting effect of select colonizing microbes such as bifidobacterial early in life (Henrick et al, Cell, 2021). The Brodin lab has also applied its technologies for systems-level immune system analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand COVID-19 in children (Brodin, P, Immunity 2022), the immunology of MIS-C (Consiglio et al, Cell, 2020) and severe COVID-19 (Rodriguez et al, Cell Reports Med, 2020) and are active members of the global COVID-Human Genetic Effort (https://www.covidhge.com/) in which we lead the LongCOVID subgroup (Brodin et al, Nat. Med, 2022).
Plenary Speakers
Iliyan Iliev, PhD
Weill Cornell Medicine, USA
Iliyan Iliev is an Immunologist and an Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine and the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in IBD at Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University, New York. He earned his PhD from the European School of Molecular Medicine and the University of Milan and was previously associated with the Tohoku University in Japan, LB Bulgaricum Plc., Meiji Co., Ltd and the Cedars Sinai Medical Center.
Iliyan Iliev’s pioneering research on the gut mycobiota defined a role of commensal fungi in innate mucosal and protective humoral immunity and provided evidence for mycobiota involvement in the pathophysiology of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The laboratory applies translational, experimental and computational approaches to study the role of immunity to mycobiota early and later in life, upon therapeutic interventions and during conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease, allergy, gastrointestinal and lung cancers, and immunodeficiencies, where fungi contribute to pathologies. Current effort in the laboratory, focused on the gut-brain axis, explores the unique neuro-modulatory properties of fungi. His research program is funded by the National Institutes of Health, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Cancer Research Institute and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and The Cancer Research Institute.
Dr. Iliev was a recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, CTSI Publication Award, Malaniak Award for Excellence in Research, Young Investigator Award by Cornell University, Irma T. Hirschl Scholar Award, Kenneth Rainin Foundation Innovator and Breakthrough Awards. In 2020 Dr. Iliev was named a Burroughs Wellcome Fund PATH Investigator. In 2022 he received Society for Mucosal Immunology Young Investigator Award and was inducted fellow by three programs: Cancer Research Institute Lloyd J. Old STAR Fellow, USA; Research Corporation for Science Advancement Fellow, USA and CIFAR Fungal Kingdom fellow, Canada.
Alain Stintzi, PhD
University of Ottawa, Canada
Alain Stintzi, Ph.D. is a professor with the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology, a member of the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology, and Vice-Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa. Dr. Stintzi obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Louis-Pasteur University, France (1997). He was subsequently a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley. In 2000, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, Oklahoma State University. Dr. Stintzi has considerable experience in systems biology approaches to study the role of the gut microbiota in infectious and chronic diseases. Dr. Stintzi has published over 130 articles and book chapters and has contributed to more than 150 scientific and educational conferences.
Christina Thornton, MD/PhD
University of Calgary, Canada
Christina Thornton, MD PhD FRCPC is an adult respirologist in the Division of Respirology, Departments of Medicine and Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Calgary, Canada. Dr. Thornton is a clinician scientist specializing in cystic fibrosis and bronchiectasis. She completed the MD/PhD program at the University of Calgary as part of the Leaders in Medicine program. Her PhD thesis looked at the lower respiratory microbiome and microbial interactions in cystic fibrosis patients. She completed her internal medicine residency followed by respirology fellowship at the University of Calgary in 2021. Dr. Thornton then went on to the University of Michigan where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in advanced microbiome community analysis in cystic fibrosis patients. She is now an assistant professor as of Aug 2022 at the University of Calgary. Dr. Thornton runs a research lab with the key interests around the role of polymicrobial infections at times of clinical stability and pulmonary exacerbation in suppurative lung disease. Her long-term career aspirations include development of a Canadian Bronchiectasis database for clinical data and sputum biobanking to better understand the role of the lung microbiome in these patients.
Lindsay Kalan, PhD
McMaster University, Canada
Lindsay Kalan, PhD is an associate professor in the Department Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University. Her PhD research focused on the interplay between microbial biosynthesis of antibiotics and resistance mechanisms. She then headed a research group in industry focused on the development of novel antimicrobial wound care devices before completing postdoctoral research in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. There she made significant advances towards understanding the role of the microbiome in diabetic foot ulcers and clinical outcomes. She was awarded the Wound Healing Societies Young Investigator Award for this work. Research in Dr. Kalan’s laboratory is focused on factors shaping microbial community assembly chronic non-healing wounds and dissecting interactions within the skin microbiome mediating cross-talk between bacterial species host cells. For this work she has received the NIH Outstanding Investigator Award and the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award. She has received substantial funding focused on the development microbiome-based biomarkers of wound healing and for antimicrobial drug discovery from human-skin associated symbionts.
Allyson Byrd, PhD
Genentech, USA
Dr. Allyson Byrd is a Principal Scientist in Cancer Immunology at Genentech. She earned her PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University, while completing her research at the National Institutes of Health. In her dissertation on the cutaneous microbiome, she showed that adults stably maintain their skin microbial communities while children with atopic dermatitis experience shifts with changes in disease state. After starting at Genentech in 2017, she shifted her focus to the gut microbiome. In the Cancer Immunology department, Allyson’s group collaborates closely with clinicians around the world to collect microbiome samples from ongoing clinical trials. They are leveraging those clinical samples to understand how gut microbes impact systemic anti-tumor immunity and response to checkpoint inhibitors. In parallel, they are studying the impact of intra-tumoral microbes on tumor gene expression. By unlocking these new sets of variables, they hope to discover new microbial biomarkers and unconventional targets for drug development.
Stuart Turvey, MBBS/DPhil
University of British Columbia, Canada
Dr. Stuart Turvey is a Professor of Pediatrics at The University of British Columbia where he holds both the Canada Research Chair in Pediatric Precision Health and the Aubrey J. Tingle Professorship in Pediatric Immunology. He is a clinician-scientist and Pediatric Immunologist based at BC Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Turvey’s research program is focused on determining the early-life origins of asthma and allergic disease, as well as harnessing the power of genomics to diagnose, treat and prevent pediatric immune disorders. His ability to transition from the clinic to the lab allows Dr. Turvey to take a precision health approach that is sensitive to the developmental course of the child. His work determines and responds to the underlying cellular, molecular and genetic abnormalities responsible for disease.
Dr. Turvey and his team generate new knowledge to define the mechanisms of disease pathogenesis and, ultimately, to identify new strategies to treat and even prevent these burdensome and often life-threatening conditions.
Sean Gibbons, PhD
Institute for Systems Biology, USA
Sean Gibbons earned his PhD in Biophysics from the University of Chicago in 2015. He completed his postdoctoral work at MIT in 2018. Sean is now an associate professor at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, USA. His lab studies the ecology and evolution of microbial communities. In particular, Sean is interested in how host-associated bacterial communities influence the health and wellness of the host organism. His group designs computational and wet-lab tools for studying these complex systems. Ultimately, the Gibbons Lab aims to develop strategies for engineering the ecology of the gut microbiome to improve human health.
Jens Walter, PhD
University College Cork, Ireland
Jens Walter serves as the Professor of Ecology, Food, and the Microbiome at Unviersity College Cork and the APC Microbiome Ireland. His expertise lies at the interface of evolutionary ecology of the gut microbiome and human nutrition. His research focuses on the evolutionary and ecological processes that have shaped host-microbiome symbiosis and the translation of basic microbiome science into therapeutic and nutritional strategies. Dr. Walter and his collaborators have pioneered the application of ecological theory to elucidate ecological and nutritional factors that shape gut microbiomes and have achieved targeted modulations of microbiomes via dietary strategies and live microbes. Prof. Walter has published >150 peer-reviewed publications and is a ‘highly cited researcher’ according to the analytics company Clarivate.
Prof. Walter’s research has been featured on six occasions in the research highlights of Nature and Nature Reviews journals, and he has participated in several invitation-only workshops and think-tanks of the NIH, CIFAR (Canadian-based global organization that convenes extraordinary minds to address the most important questions facing science and humanity; https://www.cifar.ca/) and ILSI to discuss imminent issues of the microbiome field. He has led several provocative science commentaries with other opinion leaders that inter alia challenged current paradigms in the microbiome field that required critical assessment, such as the exaggeration of causal claims (Cell, 2020, 180:221-232), the definition of prebiotics (Nat Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2015, 12:303-10), use of ‘human microbiota-associated mice’ (Cell Host and Microbe 2016, 19:575-578), and the ‘prenatal in utero microbiome’ (Nature, 2023, 613, 639–649; Microbiome 2017, 5(1):48; Microbiome 2021, 9(1):5).
Heather Armstrong, PhDMED
University of Manitoba, Canada
Cecilia Noecker, PhD
University of California San Francisco, USA
Dr. Cecilia Noecker (she/her) is a Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow and microbiome scientist in the lab of Peter Turnbaugh at the University of California San Francisco. She uses computational and experimental tools to study the structure and evolution of the metabolic networks of human gut microbes. In her graduate work with Elhanan Borenstein at the University of Washington, she developed frameworks for integrating and interpreting multi-omic microbiome data in the context of biochemical reference databases.
Jianguo (Jeff) Xia, PhD
McGill University, Canada
Dr. Xia obtained his Bachelor of Medicine (5-year program) from Peking University and his MSc and PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada. He joined McGill University in 2015 and has become an Associate Professor with tenure since 2020. Dr. Xia is a Canada Research Chair (Bioinformatics and Big Data Analytics) at McGill University, Canada. His research explores innovative and practical ways to address the current challenges in big data analytics arising from biomedical and environmental research, focusing on metabolomics, transcriptomics, microbiomics and multi-omics integration. His group is actively developing new-generation computational framework integrating cloud computing, machine learning and visual analytics to empower researchers through developing easy-to-use tools for omics data analysis. Many of the tools are widely used by researchers worldwide. To date, Dr. Xia has authored >100 journal publications and 8 book chapters. He is the 2019 McGill Principal’s Prize for Outstanding Emerging Researchers. Since 2019, he has been among the Global Highly Cited Researchers by the Web of Science (citations: >33,000, H-index: 50).
IMPACTT Mentee Speakers
Kevin McGregor, PhD
York University, Canada
Dr. Kevin McGregor received a PhD in Biostatistics from McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Celia Greenwood and Dr. Aurélie Labbe. In 2021 he started as an Assistant Professor at York University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His research has focused on various topics of statistical methods in genomics. In the past he has done work on novel Bayesian methods to model community structure in the human microbiome by means of network and diversity estimation. He has also done work in methods for adjusting for cell-type heterogeneity in DNA methylation studies.
Meredith (Merilee) Brockway, PhD
University of Calgary, Canada
Dr. Merilee (Meredith) Brockway is a registered nurse and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary with expertise in human milk composition, infant feeding, and patient engagement. She completed her PhD in nursing at the University of Calgary, examining maternal breastfeeding self-efficacy and infant feeding outcomes in moderate and late preterm infants. Following that, Merilee completed a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Manitoba in Dr. Meghan Azad’s lab, exploring human milk composition and clinical applications of donor human milk on the microbiome of preterm infants. Merilee is building a program of research looking at using human milk as a clinical intervention to mitigate early life perturbations to the infant microbiome. When Merilee is not researching breastfeeding and human milk, she enjoys skiing and hiking with her family.
Caitlin Simopoulos, PhD
Roche Canada, Canada
Dr. Caitlin Simopoulos (she/her) is a Computational Biologist at Roche Canada collaborating with scientists at Genentech Research and Early Development. She completed her PhD at McMaster University under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Weretilnyk and Dr. Brian Golding studying long non-coding RNAs through a computational lens. It was during her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Ottawa with Dr. Daniel Figeys and Dr. Mathieu Lavallée-Adam that she found a passion for exploring the gut microbiome and its connections with human health using metaproteomics. Caitlin is specifically interested in the potential of personalized medicine through the microbial interactions of the gut microbiome and drugs. On the weekends you will find her practicing yoga, cycling on some gravel roads with friends, or taking her giant Bernese Mountain Dog, Arthur, on hikes.
