Wendy Garrett is the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases in the Departments of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and of Molecular Metabolism at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and also has a Professorship in the Departments of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Garrett pursued an MD and PhD at Yale University. She completed a fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and postdoctoral training at Harvard University Medical School.

Dr. Garrett investigates host-microbiota interactions in health and disease. Her research team studies the interplay between the gastrointestinal immune system and the gut microbiota in health, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colorectal cancer (CRC). The Garrett lab focuses on how the gut microbiota influence both innate and adaptive populations and the contribution of these cells to immune homeostasis and disease.

Dr. Garrett’s team has identified specific species, pathways, and metabolites made by the microbiota that influence health and disease states. The lab also studies microbes and immune cells that are not only instrumental in potentiating carcinogenesis but are integral to intestinal homeostasis. The multi-faceted research approach includes meta’omics, microbiology, cellular immunology, biochemistry, cell biology, and cancer biology. The lab uses mouse models, human specimens, and primary and transformed mammalian cells and bacterial cells in their experiments in order to move facilel

Dr. Huttenhower’s research focuses on computational biology at the intersection of microbial community function and human health. The human body carries some four pounds of microbes, primarily in the gut, and understanding their biomolecular functions, their influences on human hosts, and the metabolic and functional roles of microbial communities generally is one of the key areas of study enabled by high-throughput sequencing. First, computational methods are needed to advance functional metagenomics. How can we understand what a microbial community is doing, what small molecule metabolites or signaling mechanisms it’s employing, and how its function relates to its organismal composition? Second, our understanding of the human microbiome and its relationship with public health remains limited. Pathogens have been examined by centuries of microbiology and epidemiology, but we know relatively little about the transmission or heritability of the normal commensal microbiota, its carriage of pathogenic functionality, or its interaction with host immunity, environment, and genetics. Finally, more broadly, novel machine learning methodology is needed to leverage structured biological knowledge in high-dimensional genomic data analysis. The Huttenhower group works on a variety of computational methods for data mining in microbial communities, model organisms, pathogens, and the human genome.

In practice, this entails a combination of computational methods development for

Dr. Chan’s work currently focuses on chronic digestive diseases, including gastrointestinal cancer (colorectal, esophageal, pancreatic), inflammatory bowel disease, diverticulitis, and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Dr. Rimm’s research group has specific interests both in the study of modifiable lifestyle choices (e.g. diet and physical activity) in relation to cardiovascular disease as well as the translation of these findings into public health interventions that are effective for schoolchildren, adults and the food insecure.

Protozoan parasites remain major causes of disease in developing countries throughout the world, yet little is known about the biology or molecular biology of these organisms. The long term goal of this work is to understand basic molecular mechanisms in protozoan parasites with the goal of discovering and applying parasite specific interventions.

The approach my laboratory has taken is to develop methods for molecular genetic manipulation of protozoan parasites in order to begin functional analysis of genes important for parasite virulence, with an emphasis of mechanisms of drug resistance in parasites. Drug resistance poses a particularly difficult problem in developing countries where newer chemotherapeutic agents are often unavailable or too expensive for routine use. Drug resistance is particularly acute in malaria where resistant parasites have spread throughout the endemic world.

Recent evidence from my laboratory and from several other groups worldwide has suggested that a major mechanism of drug resistance in protozoan parasites may be through the expression of a P-glycoprotein type molecule encoded by a multi-drug resistance gene. Genes related to mammalian multi-drug resistance genes have been identified in several protozoan parasites and overexpression of these genes is associated with drug resistance. The immediate goal of the research is to test the hypothesis that these mdr-like genes are indeed the cause of drug resistance in protozoan parasites. This work h

Dr. Frank Hu is Chair of Department of Nutrition, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Hu received his MD from Tongji Medical College in China and MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from University of Illinois at Chicago. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Nutritional Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Hu’s major research interests include epidemiology and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases through diet and lifestyle; gene-environment interactions; nutritional metabolomics; and nutrition transitions in low- and middle-income countries. Currently, he is Director of Boston Nutrition and Obesity Research Center Epidemiology and Genetics Core and Director of Dietary Biomarker Development Center at Harvard University. He has published a textbook on Obesity Epidemiology (Oxford University Press) and >1400 peer-reviewed papers with an H-index of 290. He served on the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Preventing the Global Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease, the Obesity Guideline Expert Panel, American Heart Association Nutrition Committee, and the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, USDA/HHS. He has served on the editorial boards of Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Diabetes Care, and Clinical Chemistry. Dr. Hu was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2015.

Dr. Fra…

Alberto Ascherio, MD, DrPH, is a Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and a Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ascherio received a Doctorate in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Milan and worked for several years in medicine and public health in Latin America and Africa before obtaining a Master and Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard. Dr. Ascherio has focused much of his work over the past 25 years on discovering the causes of neurodegenerative diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and cognitive decline. He has conducted longitudinal studies in many populations, including, among others, the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, the Cancer Prevention Study-II, the U.S Army, Navy and Air Force, the Danish MS Registry, and the Finnish Maternal Cohort. These studies have contributed to identifying several biomarkers and modifiable risk factors for MS (e.g. cigarette smoking, vitamin D insufficiency, and childhood obesity), Parkinson (pesticide exposure, low caffeine intake, low physical activity), and ALS (cigarette smoking, military service, low body mass index), and have in some cases provided the rationale for randomized trials (e.g. on physical activity in Parkinson disease). His most notable scientific contribution stems from the 20-year long investigation of over 10 million young adults that…

My research focuses on understanding how nutritional and lifestyle factors affect human reproduction and reproductive milestones throughout the life course, and how these events, in turn, impact other aspects of health. Over the last decade, this broad interest has focused primarily on understanding how nutrition impacts human fertility. More recently, my work has expanded to understand how reproductive events impact health throughout life.

The overarching goal of my infertility research is to identify modifiable lifestyle factors that may improve fertility in humans. Towards achieving this goal, I have developed and adapted a series conducted population-based and hospital-based epidemiologic studies which, together, allow a comprehensive examination of the relationship between nutrition and fertility. My work in population-based cohorts has included the identification of nutritional risk factors for infertility and conditions associated with infertility or decreased fecundity such as endometriosis, spontaneous abortion and ectopic pregnancy, as well studies of how nutrition relates to semen quality and other markers of testicular function in healthy young men. My parallel work among couples undergoing infertility treatment, which has primarily taken place at the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center, has focused on understanding how pre-treatment diet of both the female and the male partner influence their chances of a successful treatment.

My research agenda

We are interested in studying the interactions between the commensal microbiota, pathogens and the host immune response in the one place they must necessarily meet – the mucosa. Studying host-pathogen interactions at the mucosa allows us to exploit the Red Queen Hypothesis (co-evolving organisms locked in competition) as a discovery tool to identify novel pathways and mechanisms by which we resist or tolerate infections. We have multiple projects aimed at studying the mechanisms by which pathogens activate and evade the mucosal immune response and how these interactions are modulated by the microbiota. Our goal is to generate and test new ideas for vaccine and drug candidates to better protect people against infectious disease.

I am an ecologist and epidemiologist interested in the interface of ecosystem service provisioning and human health, specifically in the context of global trends in biodiversity loss and ecosystem transformation. Since 1999, I have been conducting ecological and public health research in Madagascar. Most broadly, I am interested in local people’s dependence on natural resources for obtaining adequate health. This interest has led to various studies into connections between marine and terrestrial wildlife consumption and the incidence of micronutrient deficiencies, the importance of botanical ethnomedicines and geophagy to local health, and the eco-epidemiology of malaria and the human microbiome given current trends in biodiversity loss and land use change. Beyond Madagascar, I have been leading a collaborative research program that evaluates the connections among climate change, fisheries management and ocean governance, and food security and human nutrition in coastal populations around the world. Given trends in mass fisheries declines, coral bleaching, and raising sea surface temperatures that will drive fisheries away from the Equator and toward the Poles, food-insecure populations across the globe will be deprived of a critical nutritional resource. Our group tackles this subject by modeling potential health futures and determining what types of interventions may be able to buffer against these impacts.

Albert Hofman, MD, PhD is the Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and the Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and Clinical Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts (USA). Dr. Hofman was the chairman of the department of Epidemiology of the Erasmus Medical Center/Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from 1988 until 2016. He has been science director of the graduate school Netherlands Institute for Health sciences (Nihes) since its start in 1990 until 2015.

I am interested in developing statistical methods for multivariate and/or high-dimensional biomedical data from a wide range of applications:

1. Multivariate statistical methods for microbiome data
One primary focus of my research program is on statistical methods development for microbiome study. One research goal is to develop spatial point pattern analysis methods for understanding the spatial organization of microbes by using spectral imaging data. Another research goal is to develop comprehensive multivariate methods for microbiome sequencing count data. These methods differ from most commonly used techniques in that they involve analyzing the spatial/counts distributions of all microbial types as a joint endpoint distribution, instead of analyzing the univariate distribution of each type separately (taxon-by-taxon analysis). The overarching goal is to provide more robust and valid quantitative analysis tools to scientists in microbiology and bioinformatics.

2. Semi-competing risks framework for multivariate survival data
Semi-competing risks refers to the setting where interest lies in a nonterminal event (e.g. hospital readmission), the occurrence of which is subject to a terminal event (e.g. death). Although less known than competing risks, semi-competing risks problem arises in a broad range of public health applications. I have developed a novel hierarchical modeling framework for the analysis of clustered semi-competing risks survival data. The framework permits

I am Professor of Epidemiology with primary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and an affiliated appointment in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, where my wet lab is located. I direct the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, a center of excellence funded by the MIDAS program of NIH/NIGMS. I am also the Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Concentration in Infectious Disease Epidemiology.

My research focuses on clinical and translational epidemiology of cancer. One aspect of my work is to integrate large-scale observational studies with biomarker-based randomized clinical trials to identify novel nutritional and gut microbiota-targeted strategies for cancer prevention and treatment. Another part of my work involves integration of electronic health record (EHR) data with molecular profiling for developing cost-effective risk assessment tools for precision cancer screening and surveillance. I was awarded the NextGen Star by the American Association for Cancer Research. My current research is supported by the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society. The ultimate goal of my research is to translate epidemiologic advances into the clinic for improved cancer prevention and treatment.

Diet/Lifestyle, Gut Microbiome, and Cancer Prevention and Treatment

Over the past few years, I have studied the role of diet and lifestyle factors, in conjunction with host immune factors and the gut microbiota, in colorectal cancer development and survivorship. Much of my work has been based on three large prospective cohort studies, the Nurses’ Health Study I and II, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, in which diet, lifestyle and colorectal cancer diagnosis and mortality have been assessed over decades with blood, stool, and tumor tissue specimens collected in a subset of participants. Building on the findings from observational studies, I am leading two …

Dr. Qi Sun’s research is focused on identifying novel biomarkers of diet and environmental exposures and risk of excess weight gain, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease by integrating the state-of-the-art of omics technologies and nutritional epidemiological approaches. His research has led to the discovery of endogenous metabolites (e.g., very-long chain saturated fatty acids), endocrine disruptors (e.g., bisphenol A and per- or polyfluoroalkyl substances), circulating proteins (e.g., fatty acid binding protein 4 and soluble leptin receptor), and gut microbiome as predictors or modulators of human metabolic diseases. He is also an established nutritional epidemiologist and has led numerous projects to elucidate associations between various dietary factors and cardiometabolic conditions in populations with and without diabetes. His study findings have enhanced the understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying nutrition and metabolic health and contributed to the US dietary guidelines for chronic disease prevention.

The focus of my research has been on the plasticity and maintenance of the Vibrio cholerae genome. Lateral gene transfer has played a major role in the evolution of pathogenic bacteria because most virulence factors are encoded on mobile genetic elements. My work has focused on two virulence-linked mobile elements in Vibrio cholerae, the agent of cholera. My laboratory has defined several of the molecular steps in the life-cycles of two novel mobile genetic elements: 1) CTXƒÖ, an integrating filamentous phage that encodes cholera toxin, the principal virulence factor of Vibrio cholerae, and 2) SXT, a V. cholerae-derived integrating conjugative element (ICE) that encodes multiple antibiotic resistance genes.

CTXƒÖ infection of non-toxigenic V. cholerae strains can render them fully pathogenic. My laboratory has dissected many of the events in the CTXƒÖ lifecycle and demonstrated the profound dependence of CTXƒÖ on its host. Cellular factors directly mediate integration of the CTXƒÖ genome into the V. cholerae chromosome, secretion of viral particles, and regulation of phage gene transcription. Currently, we are defining the molecular features of the ¡¥genetic switch¡¦ that controls CTXƒÖ prophage induction to further knowledge of the molecular controls that govern cholera toxin gene transfer.

We are studying SXT, a V. cholerae-derived integrative conjugative element (ICE) that encodes resistance to multiple antibiotics, to learn about the environmental…

My research is situated where nutrition, the human microbiome, and chronic disease epidemiology intersect. My research program has several key objectives: understanding the interindividual variability in response to diet, discovering novel biomarkers predictive of aging-related chronic diseases, and informing personalized dietary approaches for more effective prevention of cardiometabolic disease and Alzheimer’s dementia. To achieve these aims, our ongoing research initiatives integrate epidemiological methods, bioinformatic tools, and emerging ‘omics technologies. Furthermore, we employ a multi-omics approach, encompassing metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metabolomics, to decode the functional role of the microbial community in human health.

I currently serve as the PI of an R01 project (R01AG077489) that investigates the interactions between healthy dietary patterns and the gut microbiome to enhance the dietary prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia. In this NIA-funded project, we have identified dysbiosis-related markers, such as Veillonella spp. and the opportunistic pathogen Erysipelatoclostridium ramosum, as indicators of cognitive decline in the Nurses’ Health Study II (Ma et al. Neurology. 2023). I am also the PI of another R01 project (R01NR019992), which aims to understand the role of gut microbiome, interacting with host genetics and metabolic status, in explaining interindividual variations in metabolic risk changes following dietary interventions in two random