Bio:

Ami Bhatt is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Departments of Medicine (Hematology; Blood & Marrow Transplantation) and Genetics. A physician scientist with a strong interest in microbial genomics and metagenomics, she received her M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. She then carried out her residency and fellowship training at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and served as Chief Medical Resident from 2010-2011. She joined the faculty at Stanford University in 2014 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship focused on genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

Prof. Bhatt has received multiple awards including the Chen Award of Excellence from the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) and the Sloan Foundation Fellowship; she is also an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation. Her team’s research program seeks to illuminate the interplay between the microbial environment and host/clinical factors in human diseases. Her translational laboratory develops and applies novel molecular and computational tools to study strain level dynamics of the microbiome, to understand how microbial genomes change over time and predict the functional output of microbiomes. These innovations facilitate much improved (1) measurement of the types and functions of microbes in patients with non-communicable diseases, (2) understanding of the interactions between microbial genes, gene products, and host cells and (3) testing of the impact of microbially targeted interventions in clinical trials. She is keenly interested to understand how microbes “talk” to one another and to host cells, and to leverage this understanding to improve health and treat diseases. She has also worked collaboratively to mine microbial enzymes from mobile genetic elements and develop these as genome editing/engineering tools.

In addition to carrying out research at Stanford University, Prof. Bhatt has active collaborations world-wide including in Nigeria and South Africa. She is committed to ensuring that advances in research touch the lives of individuals in all income settings – and thus, in her spare time, enjoys volunteering for the nonprofit she co-founded, Global Oncology and serves as the Director for Global Oncology for Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health.