Bio
Vanessa El Kamari, MD, is a physician-scientist in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University and a member of the David Relman Laboratory. Her research investigates how host–microbe interactions in the small intestine regulate mucosal immunity, barrier integrity, and systemic inflammation in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
Her current studies use non-invasive sampling of the small intestine in conditions such as celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, and environmental enteropathy. She applies an integrative, multi-omic approach—combining microbiology, immunology, molecular biology, and computational biology—to define spatial immune–microbial networks along the human gut.
Before joining Stanford, Dr. El Kamari’s research focused on inflammation and immune activation in chronic HIV infection, where she identified gut barrier dysfunction as a key driver of systemic inflammation and cardiometabolic complications. She also led intervention studies targeting immune activation and endothelial dysfunction in HIV, work that laid the foundation for her current efforts to apply similar mechanistic approaches to autoimmune and inflammatory disorders.
