by Leigh MacMillan
Mariana Byndloss, DVM, PhD, assistant professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, has been selected to participate in the Future Research Leaders Conference at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The conference offers a career development opportunity to talented early-career biomedical and behavioral scientists from diverse backgrounds. Conference participants share their research with the NIH scientific community, and they gain insights from NIH leaders and investigators about developing independent research careers.
Byndloss is one of 30 Future Research Leaders selected from an applicant pool of more than 120 early-career scientists for this year’s conference, which will be held at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, May 20-21.
“I am honored to have been given such an outstanding opportunity of career and leadership development. I am looking forward to being able to share my work with such a talented group of diverse early-career investigators and the NIH community,” said Byndloss, who is also a member of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation (VI4), the Vanderbilt Digestive Disease Research Center (VDDRC) and the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.
Byndloss earned her DVM and PhD from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in her native Brazil. Her doctoral work, which was performed in Brazil and at the University of California, Davis, was awarded the Brazilian National Prize for best PhD thesis in Veterinary Medicine. She completed postdoctoral training with Andreas Bäumler, PhD, at UC Davis before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2018.
Byndloss’s research focuses on the links between gut microbiota, host metabolism and disease.
Projects in her laboratory seek to understand how the host and microbiota — all of the microorganisms that live in the host — work together to promote health, and what happens to cause changes in the gut microbiota (dysbiosis) during inflammation.
Her team is exploring whether non-communicable diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, cancer and cardiovascular disease — the leading causes of death in high-income countries — can be prevented by targeting the host-microbiota interaction.
