News

2024 ISB Virtual Microbiome Series

Our multi-day microbiome-themed virtual course and symposium is back for the fifth year! ISB is hosting a two-day course on October 16 & 17, 2024, followed by a symposium on October 18, 2024 titled, “A gut feeling: Microbes and their impacts on our minds.” Both events are virtual and free.

Crystal Perez joins the lab

Crystal Perez, an MD/PhD student at the University of Washington (UW) in the Molecular Engineering Program, recently joined the lab. Crystal graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. and M.S. in Biology. During her time at Stanford, she worked in David Relman’s laboratory on a project investigating arsenic’s impact on the human gut microbiome of individuals chronically exposed through groundwater. She also completed an internship in E. Peter Greenberg’s lab…

Jacob Cavon Joins the Lab

Jacob Cavon, PhD student in the Molecular Engineering and Sciences program at the University of Washington, recently jointed the lab. Jacob graduated from Montana State University, Bozeman with a BS in Cell Biology and Neuroscience. During his undergraduate career and post-graduation he characterized the function of an S. pyogenes virulence factor protein and contributed to a strep throat infection mouse model in Dr. Ben Lei’s lab. Before starting graduate school,…

Lab awarded a Global Grant for Gut Health to study healthy aging

Revealing the unique signatures of healthy guts as we age The Gibbons lab at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, US, and collaborators will use their Global Grant for Gut Health to explore the unique gut microbial compositional signatures, gut microbial functional gene signatures, and associated blood metabolites in healthy elderly people.

Alyssa Easton Joins the Lab

Alyssa Easton recently joined the lab as a PhD student from the Molecular Engineering Program at the University of Washington. Alyssa is originally from Indiana, where she completed her BS in biological engineering at Purdue University. During her time at Purdue, Alyssa worked on gene dysregulation in aging photoreceptors with Dr. Hana Hall. She also interned at the SIBYLS Beamline at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to validate AI-predicted protein structures…

Kat Ramos Sarmiento Joins the Lab

Kat Ramos Sarmiento joins the lab as a Research Associate. Kat recently graduated with a B.S. in Microbiology from UCSD. She began her laboratory career as a laboratory assistant at Garage Brew Co., where she managed yeast strains, tracked fermentation, and monitored checkpoints in the brewing process. Later, during her time at UCSD, she was a Research Assistant in the Dutton Lab, where she studied the microbial communities that reside…

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Gibbons Lab Awarded NIH R01 to Explore Precision Nutrition

The ecological structure of the human gut microbiome helps determine nutritional and phenotypic responses to diet. However, a clear mapping does not yet exist between diet, gut microbial ecology, gut microbial community metabolism, and human metabolic phenotypes. This proposal, entitled “CyberGut: towards personalized human-microbiome metabolic modeling for precision health and nutrition“, provides five years of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the design and testing of an…

Sean Gibbons

Interview with Sean in Nature Computational Biology

Dr. Sean Gibbons, assistant professor at the Institute for Systems Biology and a Washington Research Foundation Distinguished Investigator, discusses with Nature Computational Science how he uses computational science to gain insights into the gut microbiome and to address the major challenges of this field, as well as his advice to young LGBTQIA+ scientists.

Dr. Annie Levine joins the lab

Dr. Annie Levine joins the lab as a clinical fellow. Annie is a fellow in pediatric gastroenterology at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She graduated from Harvard with a BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures and earned her MD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2017. After completing her residency in pediatrics at Brown University in Providence, RI, she moved to Seattle in 2020 to start her clinical fellowship. Annie has been…

Harnessing our inner ecology to track and treat disease

ISB’s virtual course and symposium focusing on the microbiome and its future role in precision medicine will take place on October 15 and 16. The event’s website went live earlier this week. The virtual course will be taught by Sean Gibbons, Christian Diener, Tomasz Wilmanski, Noa Rappaport, Alex Carr, Priyanka Baloni and Nathan Price. Symposium speakers are Jason Papin (University of Virginia), Ines Thiele (National University of Ireland, Galway), Thomas…