Ami Bhatt

Assistant Professor, Departments of Medicine and Genetics, Divisions of Hematology and Blood and Marrow Transplantation, Stanford University

Ami is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. She earned an M.D. and Ph.D. (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) at the University of California, San Francisco and did her post-graduate training at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute.

Tanja Woyke

Microbial Genomics Program Lead, DOE Joint Genome Institute

After studying the mechanism of action of antifungal natural products and their derivatives during her Ph.D. in Microbiology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), Dr. Woyke pursued her postdoctoral research at the US DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 2004.  The main object of her research was the symbiont community of a gutless oligochaete for which she deciphered function and host-symbiont interplay using metagenomics. Taking on a Research Scientist position at the JGI/LBNL in 2007, she switched gears from metagenomics to single-cell genomics, which is now her primary interest and passion. Dr. Woyke stepped into the Microbial Genomics Program Head position in 2009. She now holds a Senior Scientist position at the JGI/LBNL and beyond her Program Head role, is Department Head for Functional Genomics within the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division of LBNL. She is also Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Merced, Adjunct Scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and Visiting Scientist at Global Viral.

Laura Dassama

ChEM-H Institute Scholar, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University

Carolin Frank

Associate Professor, Life and Environmental Sciences Department at the University of California Merced

Dr. Frank received her Ph.D. in Molecular Evolution from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2005, and was a Swedish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, until moving to UC Merced in 2008. Dr. Frank combines ecological and genomic approaches to study the microbiomes of wild plants, with a particular focus on forest trees.

Susannah Tringe

Deputy of User Programs, DOE Joint Genome Institute

Dr. Tringe is the Deputy Director for User Programs at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, where she oversees programs for accepting genomics research proposals relevant to energy and the environment. Prior to that, she was head of the Metagenome Program, where she managed a portfolio of research projects using nucleic acid sequence data to study communities of microbes from diverse environmental niches. Her major research interests relate to microbial influences on greenhouse gas uptake and release in wetlands and how microbes interact with plants to affect growth, health and disease resistance. Dr. Tringe received her undergraduate degree in Physics from Harvard University then went on to a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford University. She joined Dr. Edward Rubin's group at Berkeley Lab as a postdoc in 2003. There she developed techniques for using DNA sequence data for comparative analysis of whole microbial communities, rather than individual organisms, a field now known as metagenomics.

Benjamin Good

Assistant Professor of Applied Physics, Stanford University

Georg Zeller

Group Leader, Structural and Computational Biology, EMBL Heidelberg

Dr. Georg Zeller is a Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. He studied Computational Biology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and Uppsala University in Sweden. For his PhD, he worked with Gunnar Rätsch and Detlef Weigel at the Max Planck Institutes in Tübingen and subsequently joined Peer Bork's group at EMBL for a postdoc. His group develops analysis strategies and computational tools to extract robust microbiome disease signatures from functional and taxonomic metagenomic profiles in cross-study comparisons. He is further interested in mining metagenomes for candidate genes and pathways by which gut microbiota might contribute to initiation and progression of gastrointestinal diseases such as colorectal cancer.

Michael Snyder

Stanford W. Ascherman Professor and Chair, Department of Genetics, Director, Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, Stanford University

Geoffrey Siwo

Research Assistant Professor, Center for Research Computing and the Eck Institute for Global Health, University of Notre Dame

Geoffrey Siwo is a research assistant professor at the Center for Research Computing and Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame, IN. His research develops various computational approaches to mine biomedical datasets ranging from text in scientific literature to genomic data and medical images. His work on automated mining of biomedical literature using natural language processing has led to the first detailed global mapping of research on gene editing technologies using CRISPR. He also leads an international consortium- the Malaria DREAM challenge- that is leveraging crowdsourcing to engage data scientists across the world in developing machine learning models for accelerating global health solutions with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Liping Zhao

Eveleigh-Fenton Chair of Applied Microbiology,Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers

Liping Zhao is currently the Eveleigh-Fenton Chair of Applied Microbiology at Rutgers University and Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is a senior editor of the ISME Journal and associate editor of the journal Microbiome. He is a fellow of American Academy of Microbiology. He is a senior fellow of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He serves on Scientific Advisory Board for the Center for Microbiome Research and Education of American Gastroenterology Association (AGA). His team has pioneered the approach of applying metagenomics-metabolomics integrated tools and dietary intervention for systems understanding and predictive manipulation of gut microbiota to improve human metabolic health.

Ramesh Nair

Director, Bioinformatics, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, Stanford University

Denise Monack

Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University

Michi Taga

Associate Professor, Plant & Microbial Biology, UC Berkeley

Dr. Michi Taga earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology from Carleton College and her PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton University. At Princeton, she developed a love for microbiology while investigating the mechanisms of bacterial quorum sensing with advisor Bonnie Bassler. She then transitioned to a postdoc with Graham Walker at MIT to study bacteria-host interactions, using the Rhizobium-legume symbiosis as a model. Her postdoctoral research led to the discovery and characterization of the last missing step in the biosynthesis of vitamin B12. She joined the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, as an Assistant Professor in 2009, and is currently a tenured Associate Professor. Her laboratory investigates the mechanisms of nutrient cross-feeding among bacteria, using vitamin B12-like metabolites (corrinoids) as model nutrients. She was named a Winkler Fellow in 2010, a Hellman Fellow in 2012, and an NIH New Innovator in 2014. Her research is currently supported by NIH.

Scott Hazelhurst

Professor of Bioinformatics in the School of Electrical & Information Engineering at Wits, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Scott Hazelhurst is Professor of Bioinformatics at the School of Electrical Engineering and the Sydney Brenner Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg  (Wits). A computer scientist by training, Scott is a bioinformaticist with research interests in the microbiome, population diversity & history, and workflow design. He is an active researcher in the Human Heredity and Heath in Africa Consortium (H3A), coordinating the microbiome component of the H3A AWI-Gen project which is an investigating the environmental and genetic factors in cardio-metabolic health in African populations, and is also PI of the Wits node of the Pan-African Bioinformatics Network for H3A.

Ilana Brito

Assistant Professor, Mong Family Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in Biomedical Engineering,
Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Cornell University

Prof. Brito uses systems biology approaches to study the transmission of bacterial and genetic components of the human microbiome. She earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Genetics. She received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Earth Institute at Columbia University where she began studying the transmission of viral pathogens and emerging infectious disease. She has worked with the Broad Institute and the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies. Her lab pioneers systems-level methods to examine the human microbiome and horizontal gene transfer, the predominant mechanism by which pathogens acquire antibiotic resistance. The Brito Lab studies the transmission of commensal microbes between people and their environments and the health impacts of such transmission events. They employ a combination of microbial engineering, single-cell sequencing approaches, and novel computational algorithms applied to metagenomic data to better understand the relationship between human health and the microbiome.

Ramesh Nair, PhD, Director, Bioinformatics, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, Stanford University

As Director, Bioinformatics at Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine (SCGPM), Ramesh is the bioinformatician in residence for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) initiated Stem Cell Center of Excellence (CESCG). He is responsible for diverse bioinformatics needs for the Center Initiated Projects and its extensive collaboration network.