Jeffrey Gordon

Jeffrey Gordon is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his A.B. from Oberlin College and M.D. 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 Washington University where he has spent his entire career. He subsequently joined the faculty at Washington University where he has spent his entire career, first as a member of the Departments of Medicine and Biological Chemistry, then as Head of the Department of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology and now as Founding Director of the University’s interdepartmental Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology.His group has used interdisciplinary approaches for defining mechanisms that underlie the assembly, expressed functions, and host effects of human gut microbial communities. Their translational studies, which include a long-standing collaboration with Tahmeed Ahmed at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, combine gnotobiotic animal models with characterization of the microbiomes and physiologic features of the very human populations whose microbes have been incorporated into the animal models. This approach has allowed them to identify therapeutic targets in order to deliberately alter microbiome properties under conditions where postnatal microbial community assembly have been perturbed, as exemplified by their discovery and subsequent randomized controlled clinical trials of microbiome-directed therapeutic foods for childhood undernutrition.He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society. Awards include the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the Copley Medal from the Royal Society, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine, the Balzan Prize, the Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research and the Albany Medical Center Prize.He has had the privilege of being the research mentor to 146 PhD students and post-doctoral fellows since his lab was established.