Rhode Island Microbiome Symposium 2022

About the event

The Rhode Island Microbiome Symposium is a forum for microbiome researchers from Rhode Island institutions and other institutions in the Northeast to network and communicate research results. This symposium focuses on the roles of microbial communities in biomedical and environmental contexts and encompasses a diverse range of fields including bioinformatics, microbial ecology, host-microbe interactions, and environmental health sciences. We encourage anyone with an interest in microbiome and/or microbial ecology to attend!

SWITCH TO VIRTUAL FORMAT: Due to the ongoing Covid pandemic, we have made the switch from a live format to virtual. The conference is now free and will be held virtually from 9:30AM-5:00PM on Jan 14. Talks will be through Zoom (accessible on the day of the symposium through links on the agenda) and the virtual poster session will be conducted through Fourwaves. Please register here for the conference to access the Zoom webinar link through the agenda page. If you have any questions, please contact Chris Hemme at hemmecl@uri.edu

POSTER ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JAN 13: Please submit an abstract on the abstract submission page. Content can be added later through your Fourwaves account (top right corner). The Fourwaves virtual poster session platform allows for both poster and lightning talk presentation formats so you can choose how best to present your research.

Promoting Microbiome and Microbial Ecology Research in Rhode Island and the Northeast

We welcome you to attend the 2nd Rhode Island Microbiome Symposium to be held virtually January 14, 2022. This symposium is to bring together Rhode Island and other researchers who conduct or are interested in conducting microbiome research. The symposium will include keynote speakers Dr. Alvaro Sanchez (Yale) and Dr. Sue Ishaq (University of Maine), formal talks from Rhode Island researchers, lightning talks for students and postdocs, and a poster session.

The goal of this symposium is to promote microbiome and microbial research in Rhode Island by bringing together researchers from state universities and hospitals who currently work on microbiome research or who are interested in starting microbiome research. We hope this symposium will stimulate networking and result in new collaborations, grant proposals and manuscripts. While the scope is broad to encourage participation, the general focus will be on microbiome research relevant to the State of Rhode Island such as ocean health, aquaculture and precision medicine initiatives.

Our Speakers

The symposium will feature a variety of speakers on a range of topics related to microbiome research. Our keynote speakers are Dr. Alvaro Sanchez from Yale University presenting "Evolutionary Engineering of Microbial Consortia" and Dr. Suzanne Ishaq presenting “Microbes at the nexus of environmental, biological, and social research”.

Alvaro Sanchez

Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology/Microbial Sciences Institute

Alvaro Sanchez is an Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and a faculty member at the Microbial Sciences Institute. He has undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and the University of Minnesota, respectively, and a PhD in Biophysics & Structural Biology from Brandeis University. After completing his postdoctoral training at MIT, he spent three years as a Junior Fellow (group leader) at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University before joining Yale in 2016. The Sanchez lab seeks to predict how microbial communities form and evolve, and how they can be manipulated to serve useful purposes. To that end, the lab cultivates microbial communities in defined environments in high-throughput, and develops novel computational methods to model interactions between microbes and their environment. Sanchez has been a recipient of grants from NIH, the Simons and Moore Foundations, and the Human Frontiers Science Program. He is a Scialog Fellow from the Moore Foundation and Research Corporation, a Packard Fellow from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and in 2021 he was awarded the Greer Prize by Yale University.
Suzanne Ishaq

University of Maine

Dr. Ishaq received her doctorate in Animal, Nutrition and Food Science from the University of Vermont in 2015 where her graduate study focused on the rumen microbiology of the moose. She held post-doctoral positions at Montana State University, and a research faculty position at the University of Oregon. Since 2019, her lab in Maine focuses on host-associated microbial communities in animals and humans, and, how host and microbes interact in the gut.
In addition to her research on gut microbes, Dr. Ishaq is the founder of the Microbes and Social Equity working group. This group formed to examine, publicize, and promote a research program on the reciprocal impact of social inequality and microbiomes, both human and environmental. Membership is free and open to all.