Media Coverage (Microbiome)

ISB Postdoc Nathaniel (Nate) Ritz, Ph.D., was named a 2026 WRF Postdoctoral Fellow, receiving three years of support from the Washington Research Foundation to advance technology that decodes gut microbiota-host chemical communication. The award is part of WRF’s statewide program backing early-career scientists pursuing high-impact research.

Dr. Lee Hood joined podcast host Jeremy Koenig to discuss the evolution of medicine from reactive care to P4 health. He explored eight paradigm shifts that have transformed biology and highlighted how systems thinking, big data, and AI are reshaping wellness and personalized care.

ISB’s Sean Gibbons joins host Mark Martin and provides a lively tour of how you actually “count” a microbiome – turning gut talk into hard numbers with tools like metagenomics, qPCR, and flow cytometry, plus myth-busting and why biomass and growth rates matter for real-world health.

Dr. Sean Gibbons joins Dr. Buck Joffrey for a podcast interview to discuss the complexities of the gut microbiome, its evolution, and its significant role in health and longevity. Gibbons explains how our microbiome is established at birth, how it changes throughout life, and the impact of diet and lifestyle on its composition. The discussion also covers the challenges of modifying the microbiome, the potential of precision nutrition, and the emerging field of fecal transplants.

Using microbial community-scale metabolic models, ISB’s Gibbons Lab can analyze an individual’s gut microbiome data and predict the colonization risk of Clostridioides difficile. In an interview, Associate Professor Dr. Sean Gibbons discussed the implications of this research.

This news story details work out of ISB’s Gibbons Lab – the developtment of personalized modeling framework that forecasts C. diff colonization risk based on an individual’s unique gut microbiome. The team demonstrated how these models can also test targeted probiotic therapies designed to suppress C. diff growth before it turns deadly.

Published research out of ISB’s Gibbons Lab is highlighted in this story, showing that pooping too often or too rarely are both associated with different underlying health issues.

How does food DNA impact the human body? In what ways do ecological communities in the gut change and adapt to individual people over time? In this podcast episode, Dr. Sean Gibbons discusses a breakthrough method that analyzes food-derived DNA in fecal metagenomes – and what this means for human health.