April 18

Research Seminar: “Canary in the Coal Mine: How the neonatal gut microbiome promotes atopy and asthma development in childhood”

Speaker: Susan Lynch, PhD, Professor of Medicine, Director Colitis and Crohn's Disease, Microbiome Research Core, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco

Talk Summary: The gut microbiome has been implicated in a range of diseases, including those that manifest at remote organ sites. It is also known to be shaped by a number of early life exposures that modify risk for childhood atopy and asthma. Studies of the early-life gut microbiome, have uncovered neonatal perturbations associated with subsequent atopy and asthma development in childhood. They have also identified microbial-derived mechanisms that promote regulatory T cell dysfunction in the high-risk neonatal gut microbiome, thus offering a mechanistic role for microbes and their products in childhood atopy and asthma development.

About the Speaker: Dr. Lynch is a Professor of Medicine, at the University of California San Francisco, where she also directs the Microbiome Research Core and acts as Associate Director of the Microbiome in Inflammatory Disease Program. Her “ecosystems to molecules” research program focuses primarily on the gastrointestinal microbiome, and its role in both the origins, and sustained promotion of chronic inflammatory diseases, including airway inflammatory diseases.

Dr. Lynch has been awarded the Rebecca Buckley Lectureship by the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, featured in International Innovation: Women in Healthcare, and named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s “Global Thinkers” in 2016. She is an American Society of Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer and served on the National Academy of Science Committee on Advancing Understanding of the Implications of Environmental-Chemical Interactions with the Human Microbiomes.

Hosted by Allison Knoll, PhD,Assistant Professor of Research Pediatrics, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California

RSVP is required to tecpad@chla.usc.edu