UAB Microbiome Symposium

November 12, 2018, UAB Alumni House

8:15-8:50 am
Registration and Continental Breakfast

8:50 to 9:00 am
Welcome Address: Dr. Hui Wu, Director UAB Microbiome Center

Keynote Address
9:00 to 10:00 am
“The Human Microbiome in Health and Disease”
Karen E. Nelson, Ph.D., Professor of Genomic Medicine,
President of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI)

Dr. Nelson received her undergraduate degree from the University of the
West Indies, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She has authored or co-authored over 190
peer reviewed publications, edited three books, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal
Microbial Ecology. Dr. Nelson is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and
serves on their Board of Life Sciences. Other honors include being named ARCS Scientist of
the Year 2017; elected to the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2018; a Fellow of the American
Academy of Microbiology; an Honorary Professor at the University of the West Indies; and a
Helmholtz International Fellow. Dr. Nelson has extensive experience in microbial ecology,
microbial genomics, microbial physiology and metagenomics. Dr. Nelson has led several
genomic and metagenomic efforts, and led the first human metagenomics study that was
published in 2006. Additional ongoing studies in her group include metagenomic approaches to
study the ecology of the gastrointestinal tract of humans and animals, studies on the
relationship between the microbiome and various human and animal disease conditions,
reference genome sequencing and analysis primarily for the human body, and other -omics
studies.

Featured Speakers

10:00 to 10:45 am
"Spatial Organization in the Human Microbiome at Micron Scales"
Jessica Mark Welch, PhD, Associate Scientist at the Marine Biological
Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Together with colleagues Dr. Welch developed CLASI-FISH (Combinatorial Labeling and
Spectral Imaging - Fluorescence in situ Hybridization), a method for simultaneously labeling and
identifying many different microbial taxa in complex communities. She has applied this method
to investigate spatial organization in the microbiomes of marine organisms as well as the gut
and the human mouth.

10:45 to 11:15 am
“Strain-level variation in gut microbiome composition drives host immune
tone”
Jeremiah Faith, PhD, Assistant Professor, the Immunology Institute & the
Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology in the Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Faith’s research focuses on modeling the interactions between gut microbes and host
physiology with an emphasis on Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Ongoing research in the lab
includes: 1) understanding the influence of gut microbiota strain variation on human disease risk,
2) identifying microbial strains that modulate host phenotypic variation, and 3) the stability of the
human gut microbiota.
11:15 to 12:00 noon
"Spatial metabolomics to probe microbial interactions"
Dr. Neha Garg, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Chemistry and
Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Garg is interested in studying the impact of microbial metabolites on

human health. She has developed tools to visualize microbial
communications in three dimensions on radiological images of human lungs associated with
cystic fibrosis. The three-dimensional metabolome and microbiome based-organ maps enable
understanding of spatial variation in the interactions between the pharmaceutical exposure,
microbial communities and the human host afflicted with cystic fibrosis.

12:00 noon to 1:30pm

Lunch break with attendees, students and postdocs

1:30 to 2:15 pm
“Precision editing of the gut microbiota”
Sebastian Winter, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology,
UT Southwestern Medical Center

Dr. Winter’s group has two main focuses in their ongoing research: 1)
Interactions among the host, the intestinal microbiota, and enteric pathogens,
particularly during episodes of intestinal inflammation. And 2) The
mechanisms of microbiota changes in the inflamed intestine in the absence
of a bacterial pathogen.

2:15 to 3:00 pm
“Mechanistic insights on Fusobacterium nucleatum in colorectal cancer”
Yiping W. Han, PhD, Professor, Columbia University Medical Center

The human microbiome is a vast population of microbes that inhabit various

surfaces of the body, and play an essential role in health and disease. Dr.
Han’s lab is interested in the interactions of these microbes and their human
hosts, and work in her laboratory is focused on this line of investigation,
including Investigating the mechanisms of Fusobacterium nucleatum pathogenesis in pregnancy
complications and colorectal cancer.

3:00pm to 4:30pm

Reception at UAB Alumni House