Jack Gilbert
External Advisory Committee members
- Professor
- Department of Pediatrics and
- Scripps Institution of Oceanography
- Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Science
- Deputy Director for Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Biography
Professor Jack A. Gilbert (he/him) earned his Ph.D. from Unilever and Nottingham University, UK in 2002, and received his postdoctoral training at Queens University, Canada. From 2005-2010 he was a senior scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK; and from 2010-2018 he was Group Leader for Microbial Ecology at Argonne National Laboratory, a Professor of Surgery, and Director of The Microbiome Center at University of Chicago. In 2019 he moved to the University of California San Diego, where he is a Professor in Pediatrics and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Science, and Director of the Microbiome and Metagenomics Center. Dr. Gilbert uses molecular analysis to test fundamental hypotheses in microbial ecology. He cofounded the Earth Microbiome Project and American Gut Project. He has authored more than 450 peer reviewed publications and book chapters on microbial ecology. He is the founding Editor in Chief of mSystems journal. In2014 he was recognized on Crain’s Business Chicago’s 40 Under 40 List, and in 2015 he was listed as one of the 50 most influential scientists by Business Insider, and in the Brilliant Ten by Popular Scientist. In 2016 he won the Altemeier Prize from the Surgical Infection Society, and the WH Pierce Prize from the Society for Applied Microbiology for research excellence. In 2017 he co-authored “Dirt is Good”, a popular science guide to the microbiome and children’s health. In 2018, he founded BiomeSense Inc. to produce automated microbiome sensors. In 2021 Dr Gilbert became the UCSD PI for the National Institutes of Health’s $175M Nutrition for Precision Health program. In 2023 he became President of Applied Microbiology International, and won the 2023 IFF Microbiome Science Prize. His publications can be found here.
Director of the Microbiome and Metagenomics Center
UC San Diego School of Medicine
Janet Jansson
External Advisory Committee members
Chief Scientist/Laboratory Fellow (Retired) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – PNNL
Biography
Janet Knutson Jansson is an American biological scientist and internationally recognized leader in microbial ecology. She currently serves as Chief Scientist for Biology at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where she investigates the structure, function, and environmental resilience of complex microbial communities in soils and the human gut. Jansson is a key contributor to the Phenotypic Response of the Soil Microbiome to Environmental Perturbations Science Focus Area and is a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology. She was the first to use molecular techniques such as genome sequencing to understand the human gut, gaining insight about the types of microbes that were involved in health and disease
Jansson spent much of her early career in Sweden at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, where she served as researcher, lecturer, professor, and Chair of Environmental Biology. After returning to the United States in 2007, she joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a senior staff scientist and held joint appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Copenhagen.
Since joining PNNL in 2014, Jansson has pioneered multi-omics approaches to study how climate change affects soil and permafrost microbiomes, as well as how drought alters grassland ecosystems. She is also widely recognized for her groundbreaking use of molecular techniques to characterize the human gut microbiome, providing new insights into how diet and disease shape microbial communities. Jansson has served in several scientific leadership roles She served as President of the International Society for Microbiology. She was appointed to the National Academy of Sciences committee on Soil Sciences in 2020. She is currently on the Scientific Advisory Board of Seed.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-G4QxjIAAAAJ&hl=en
Martin J Blaser
Biography
Martin J. Blaser holds the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome at Rutgers University, where he also serves as Professor of Medicine and Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, and as Director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine. Previously, he served as Chair of the Department of Medicine at New York University. A physician and microbiologist, Dr. Blaser has been studying the relationships we have with our persistently colonizing bacteria. His work over 30 years focused on Campylobacter species and Helicobacter pylori, which also are model systems for understanding the interactions of residential bacteria with their hosts. Over the last 20 years, he has also been actively studying the relationship of the human microbiome with health and important diseases including asthma and allergy, obesity, diabetes, neurological conditions, and cancer. Dr. Blaser has served as the advisor to many students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty. He holds 28 U.S. patents and has authored over 600 original articles. He wrote Missing Microbes, a book targeted to general audiences, now translated into 20 languages.
