Jeffrey I. Gordon

Jeffrey I. Gordon is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor and Director of The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine. He is considered to be the "father" of human microbiome research. His studies of healthy and undernourished children living in low- and middle-income countries have yielded insights about how the gut microbiome develops in the first several years after birth, and evidence that disrupted gut microbiome development is a contributing cause of childhood undernutrition.

Gordon and his group's work has advanced scientific understanding of the human gut microbiome as a microbial "organ" that affects human health and disease beyond gastrointestinal health. Their work has entailed developing experimental and computational approaches for dissecting the vast complexity and dynamism of the gut microbiome to identify microbial effectors of postnatal growth, discovering food formulations and their bioactive molecules that repair undernourished children’s gut microbiomes, and characterizing how microbiome repair in these children has effects that extend beyond the walls of the gut to influence regulators of muscle, bone, and brain development plus immune and metabolic functions. Overall, this work illustrates the importance of understanding that human health reflects an integration of activities of our human and microbial cells and genes.

Much of Gordon's work has focused on addressing the global health challenge of childhood undernutrition. Central questions that Gordon and his lab are pursuing include how our gut microbial communities influence human health, what interventions will repair microbial communities for an individual or a population to optimize healthy development, and how to create local infrastructures to deliver treatment in affordable, culturally acceptable, appetizing foods. He and his team identified underdeveloped gut microbiota as a contributing cause of childhood malnutrition and found that therapeutic food aimed at repairing the gut microbiome is more effective than a widely used standard therapeutic food to treat childhood malnutrition. Unlike standard therapeutic foods, these microbiome-directed foods improve long-term effects of malnutrition, including problems with metabolism, bone growth, immune function and brain development.