The conditions a child starts life in, from the mother’s diet and pregnancy history to the first microbes the baby meets at birth, shape health for decades. I study how those conditions are set and how the gut carries them forward, from infancy into aging. I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University.
My first question was when that process begins. Using contamination-aware methods, I showed that the gut is colonized at birth and not before. Since then I’ve followed what the mother passes on. A first pregnancy changes the maternal gut microbiome differently than later ones, and in mice, a maternal high-fat diet alters the fetal gut with effects that last into adulthood. The Research page has the details.
Next, I want to follow that chain forward, from which early differences in the infant microbiome track with growth and allergy in childhood to whether programming before birth changes how we age. I work at the bench and the keyboard, from culturing and banking bacterial strains to shotgun metagenomics and computational methods for tracking microbial communities over time. I lead the Good Bugs Study, which tests whether specific vaginal microbes protect mothers and newborns from Group B Streptococcus.
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