Faculty/Staff Daily Digest

MCB Seminar Series: Dr. Elizabeth Johnson, Assistant Professor, Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University

Host: Dr. Milligan-Myhre

"Infant nutrition as a precise modulator of gut microbiome function"

Summary: Lipids found in human milk contribute significantly to growth but also have the potential to interact with members of the gut microbiome. This talk will cover a new approach to understanding how dietary lipids directly influence the production of microbial metabolites that could support infant health.

Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Nutrition at Cornell University.  Her research program focuses on understanding how lipids mediate diet-microbiome-host interactions with the goal of manipulating these interactions for the benefit of host health.  She studied biology at Spelman College before receiving an NSF graduate research fellowship to pursue a PhD investigating cell cycle transcriptomics at Princeton University.  Johnson went on to study lipid-dependent host-microbe interactions during her postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. Ruth Ley before joining the faculty at Cornell University in the Division of Nutritional Sciences.  Johnson is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Humans & the Microbiome program. She enjoys thinking about the importance of host-microbe interactions in early life and finds much inspiration from her two small gut microbiome sample generators. 

To learn more about Dr. Johnson and her research visit

https://www.jlr.org/article/S0022-2275(21)00014-6/fulltext

https://www.johnsonlab.nutrition.cornell.edu