Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD
Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at WashU. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Chicago. After completing his clinical training in internal medicine and gastroenterology and doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the NIH, he joined the faculty at WashU, where he has spent his entire career, first as a member of the Departments of Medicine and of Biological Chemistry, then as head of the Department of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology (now the Department of Developmental Biology) and currently as Founding Director of The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology.
Gordon’s group has used interdisciplinary approaches for defining mechanisms that underlie the postnatal assembly and expressed functions of human gut microbial communities. His group’s studies of the role of the gut microbiome in childhood undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries has resulted in the development of microbiome-directed therapeutic foods for restoring healthy postnatal development. Known as the “father of human microbiome research,” he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and he is the recipient of a number of international prizes for his contributions to biomedicine. Gordon has had the privilege of being the research mentor to 151 PhD students and post-doctoral fellows since his lab was established.