Taichi A. Suzuki & Ruth Ley

Taichi Suzuki is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley and is starting as an assistant professor at Arizona State University in 2023. Suzuki investigates the ecology and evolution of host-microbial interactions in humans and wild mice. The work produced more than 10 first-author papers in top-ranked journals including Science, PNAS, and Molecular Ecology, and was supported by 21 grants including National Science Foundation DDIG and National Geographic Young Explorer grant. He taught at two state universities for eight years and received the outstanding graduate student instructor award at UC Berkeley. He has written articles for the Japanese Embassy of the United States and various non-profit organizations supporting international students and researchers. Ruth Ley is the current Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, and the Director of the Department of Microbiome Science. Her research team performs basic science research into the ecology and evolution of the human gut microbiome. Ley received a BA in Integrative Biology from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her post-doctoral work at Washington University School of Medicine with Dr. Jeffrey Gordon was the first to link the microbial ecology of the gut to health and disease, with pioneering research on obesity in mice and humans. In July 2008, Ley joined the Department of Microbiology at Cornell University as an Assistant Professor, and in 2013 became an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. At Cornell University, her lab made the first observations of the role of the gut microbiome in pregnancy, and the first links between human genetic diversity and the microbiome. Now at the Max Planck Institute for Biology, her work continues to reveal fundamental insights into the gut microbiome.