Mariana Byndloss, DVM, PhD, assistant professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, has received the 2026 ASM Award for Early Career Basic Research from the American Society for Microbiology.
Byndloss is one of 20 honorees of ASM’s 2026 Awards and Prize Program. ASM, one of the largest life sciences professional societies with over 37,000 scientists and health practitioners, promotes and advances the microbial sciences.
“The ASM Awards and Prize Program celebrates the groundbreaking research and dedication that drive microbiology forward,” said ASM CEO Stefano Bertuzzi, PhD, MPH, in a press release. “Receiving one of these awards is a meaningful recognition of a scientist’s impact and serves as an inspiration for future leaders in our field.”
Byndloss, who joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2018, studies the links between the gut microbiota (the microorganisms that reside in the intestines), host metabolism and disease. She and her team are exploring how the host and microbiota work together to promote health, and what happens when environmental factors like diet, antibiotics and inflammation disrupt the microbiota and increase risk for colorectal cancer, cardiovascular disease, childhood obesity and other disorders.
“I would like to thank ASM for this recognition. I am honored to know that my fellow microbiologists believe my lab’s work is worthy of this award, which is also a recognition of my phenomenal trainees and their dedication for the past seven years,” Byndloss said.
For each of the last four years, Byndloss has been among the world’s “Highly Cited Researchers” — scientists whose papers have been cited most frequently by other scientists.
Among their many discoveries, Byndloss and her colleagues have demonstrated how Salmonella bacteria “steal” nutrients from the gut’s resident microbes, which could point to novel strategies for treating food poisoning and other types of gastroenteritis, and they’ve shown that beneficial bacteria in the small intestines produce a compound that protects against obesity, offering the possibility of providing therapeutic probiotic bacteria.
Byndloss received a 2024 FASEB Excellence in Science Award. In 2023, she was selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as one of the first Freeman Hrabowski Scholars, and she was one of eight Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease.
Byndloss earned her DVM and PhD from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in her native Brazil and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Davis before joining the Vanderbilt faculty. She is co-director of the Vanderbilt Microbiome Innovation Center, a campuswide effort to advance microbiome/microbiota research, therapy, education and policy.
