Suzanne Devkota, PhD

Dr. Devkota is an Associate Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Human Microbiome Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; Associate Professor-in-Residence at UCLA; and an adjunct investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School. She has been studying the effect of diet on gut microbiome structure and function in metabolic and inflammatory bowel diseases for the past 16 years, and more recently her lab has developed interest in the microbial ecology of gut bacterial translocation in the human body, and the body’s concomitant response to manage microbes in atypical body sites. Particular interest lies in selection pressures that shift certain commensal microbes toward pathogenic phenotypes, tissue-specific strain variation, and the impact diet and medications have on this process. She completed her doctoral and post-doctoral training at The University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School respectively, and is a former Branco Weiss Fellow of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.