When: Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 4 p.m.

Location: ESJ 2204

Invited Speaker Series

Speaker: Jotham Suez, Feinstone Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Talk: "Personalized Nutrition and the Microbiome"

When: Tuesday, April 29 from 4–5 p.m.

Location: ESJ 2204

Can gut bacteria decode your ideal diet? Surprisingly, identical meals can trigger vastly different post-prandial fluctuations in blood glucose among various individuals. While probiotic supplements may offer health benefits to certain individuals, they remain ineffective for others. Similarly, the impact of artificial sweeteners on metabolic health is heavily contested, with some studies revealing harm and others indicating advantages. The intricate and divergent effects of dietary elements on human health pose a challenge in crafting overarching dietary guidelines for the public. Person-to-person variability in the makeup of the intestinal microbiome may underlie the discrepancies in human responses to diet. In this talk, we will discuss the potential and limitations of harnessing the microbiome to tailor personalized nutritional advice and explore the mechanisms through which the microbiome contributes to heterogeneity in responses to diet.

Get all of the center's upcoming events on your UMD google calendar with one click (only accessible with UMD account).

The upcoming courses listed below may be relevant to students in microbiome research, please encourage them to register.

Summer 2025

Infectious Disease Dynamics: A Systems Approach (BIOL 708F/BSCI 439C)

This course is open to advanced undergraduate and graduate students from diverse disciplines. See flyer for more details and requirements. Instructors: Associate Research Scientists Gabi Steinbach and Stephen Beckett.

Fall 2025

• BSCI 424 Pathogenic Microbiology by Volker Briken
• BSCI 443 Microbial Physiology by Jiqiang (Lanny) Ling
• BSCI 464 Microbial Ecology by Charles Delwiche
• ENST 432 Environmental Microbiology by Stephanie Yarwood
• NFSC 427/627 Current Topics on Diet, Gut Microbiota Health & Metabolic Disease by Diana Obanda
• NFSC 498K/678K Gut Microbiota Health, Diet and Nutrition by Diana Obanda
• PLSC 115 How Safe is Your Salad? The Microbiological Safety of Fresh produce by Shirley Micallef
• PLSC 489E Human Pathogens on Plants by Shirley Micallef
• NFSC 679G R for Applied Genomics by Ryan Blaustein
• BIOE 461 Synthetic Biology by Sara Molinari and Edward Eisenstein
• BSCI 213 The Public Microbe by Joshua Weiss
• BSCI 223 General Microbiology by John Buchner

Conferences

ASM Distinguished Lecturer Dinner-meeting

Speaker: ASM Waksman Foundation Distinguished Lecturer Joanne Engel, M.D., Ph.D., Professor, University of California at San Francisco.

Talk: "Pathogenesis of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Infections with a Special Emphasis on Bacterial Signal Transduction, Virulence Programs, Secreted Effectors"

When: Tuesday, April 22

Location: Sheraton Baltimore North Hotel

Meeting registration and meal selection via PayPal is available on the Branch website, and must be made by April 16. Learn More

Webinar

ASM webinar on Microbial Genome Data Analysis

This four-part live webinar series aims to help researchers and educators develop essential computational biology skills using KBase, a free, open-access data analysis platform. Part of the NSF-funded MICROnet initiative, this series covers microbial isolate genome analysis, from raw sequence data to data publication. There are two webinars left in the series: on April 29 about taxonomic and functional analysis, and on May 6 for microbiology resource announcement templates for isolates. Learn More

Job Opening

Assistant Professor in Bioinformatics, Virginia Commonwealth University

The Virginia Commonwealth University is seeking applicants for the position of Assistant Professor (non-tenure eligible) whose expertise in bioinformatics will contribute to the teaching and service missions of the Bioinformatics programs. The Bioinformatics curriculum focuses on hands-on experiential learning that brings together computation, statistics, and biology. This 9-month faculty position will be housed in the School for Life Sciences and Sustainability and report to the school Director. This position has both teaching (80%) and service (20%) effort allocations. Learn More

Job Board

Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB)

The are currently more than 150 job openings on SIMB's job board. Learn More

To have your research, events, or other resources included in the next newsletter, contact the center's program coordinator Gabi Steinbach at gabis@umd.edu.

For previous issues of the newsletter, see the Newsletter Archive.