2026 Speakers

The ISAPP 2026 meeting program features plenary speakers sharing cutting-edge research. Speakers are in order of program appearance.

Dr. Junki Miyamoto, PhD

Dr. Junki Miyamoto is an Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan. He received his PhD in Agriculture from Hiroshima University in 2017. His research focuses on diet-derived gut microbial metabolites and their roles in regulating host homeostasis. By employing interdisciplinary approaches, including microbiology, metabolomics, and nutritional science, he investigates host–microbiota interactions at molecular and physiological levels. His work aims to elucidate the mechanisms by which microbial metabolites mediate metabolic and immune functions, thereby linking dietary factors to host health. Through his research, he seeks to advance fundamental understanding of gut microbiota–host interactions and to contribute to the development of scientific bases for nutritional interventions and functional foods.

Prof. Yuji Naito, MD PhD

Yuji Naito, M.D., Ph.D., obtained his M.D. degree at the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Kyoto, Japan in 1983, and performed Ph.D. studies at the same university from 1983–1993. He is currently a Professor of Department of Human Immunology and Nutrition Science, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine. From 2017, his group has started the longevity cohort study in Kyotango, Japan, one of the world’s most intensively studied regions for healthy aging. Research conducted in this population has revealed distinctive lifestyle patterns, dietary habits, and biological signatures that together support extended healthspan. At the center of these findings lies the microbiota-gut-brain axis, a critical integrative system connecting metabolism, immunity, inflammation, and cognitive health.

Prof. Hannah D. Holscher, PhD RD

Prof. Hannah Holscher is an Associate Professor of Nutrition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Personalized Nutrition Initiative and holds affiliations with the Division of Nutritional Sciences, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her research integrates clinical nutrition, microbiome science, and computational biology to explore how diet influences human health. She has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications and leads multidisciplinary research projects supported by government agencies, foundations, commodity boards, and private industry. Prof. Holscher has held leadership roles within the American Society for Nutrition and serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Nutrition and Nutrition Research.

Prof. Michael Gänzle, PhD

Prof. Michael Gänzle is trained as Food Engineer at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, and obtained his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees in Food Microbiology at the University of Hohenheim and the Technical University of Munich, respectively. He is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Food Microbiology and Probiotics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023. From 2021 to 2024, he was recognized as Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. His research links microbial phylogeny, physiology and ecology to food quality, food safety and host health. More information is provided on the institutional homepage.

Prof. Takane Katayama, PhD

Takane Katayama received his Ph.D. in Applied Microbiology from Kyoto University in 1999 and was appointed Professor at Kyoto University in 2015. He became interested in gut microbial research following the isolation of two novel glycosidases from bifidobacteria in 2002, and since then, his work has focused on the functional analysis of bifidobacterial genes and enzymes involved in the metabolism of host-derived carbohydrates, including human milk oligosaccharides and mucin O-glycans, as well as aromatic amino acids. His research has contributed to elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying Bifidobacterium–human symbiosis.

Dr. Susan Woods, PhD

Dr. Susan Woods established her Gut Cancer research group at Adelaide University within the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute in 2019. She trained both in Australia and in San Francisco, USA, with Nobel Laureate J. Michael Bishop, and is the Gastroenterology Society of Australia (GESA) Bushell Research Fellow. Her group is supported by Australian and US (NIH) Government funding, GESA and Hospital Research Foundation funding. Research in Susan’s group aims to improve early detection methods for gut cancers, so that they may be identified at a point when most can be cured. This involves the application of synthetic biology approaches to engineer bacteria to act as disease detectors in the gut. The team is also developing engineered bacteria to deliver treatments directly to tumours, to reduce unwanted side-effects of treatment. Her group is assessing the clinical utility of patient tissue samples cultured as organoids, to guide choice of personalised treatments for advanced disease.

Prof. Dirk Haller, PhD

Prof. Dirk Haller pioneered the field of nutrition and microbiome research, and over the past two decades, he has developed highly innovative, truly interdisciplinary research. He holds the Chair of Nutrition and Immunology at the Technical University of Munich. In more than 250 publications, he developed novel concepts to elucidate the role of the microbiome in the pathogenesis of chronic inflammation and cancer. The question of how commensal microbes interact with the host at the gut-epithelial interface has become the primary research paradigm. Newly developed gnotobiotic animal models are the backbone of his translational research program. Receiving the Main Award of the German Society of Medical Microbiology, the distinguished Research Award of the United European Gastroenterology Association, and the recognition as a Highly Cited Researcher highlight his global scientific reputation across disciplines.

Prof. Yukihiro Furusawa, PhD

Yukihiro Furusawa, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Engineering at Toyama Prefectural University, Japan. He earned his BS in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Toyama (2006), completed an MS program in Pharmaceutical Sciences (2008), and received his PhD in Medical Science from the University of Toyama (2012). After his doctorate, Dr. Furusawa served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at RIKEN RCAI (Research Center for Allergy and Immunology) and as a Project Assistant Professor at The University of Tokyo, focusing on mucosal immunology. He subsequently joined the Faculty of Pharmacy at Keio University as an Assistant Professor (2014). Since 2015, he has been at Toyama Prefectural University, where he advanced to Associate Professor in 2020 and moved to Pharmaceutical Engineering in 2021.

Prof. Susanne Brix, PhD

Susanne Brix is Professor of Immune–Microbiota Interactions at the Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). She earned her MSc in Biotechnology from DTU and completed her PhD in Nutritional Immunology in 2005, during which she was a visiting researcher at the Nestlé Research Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland.

She heads the Section for Medical Biotechnology and has led the Disease Systems Immunology research group since 2014. Her research focuses on understanding host–microbiota interactions and immune regulation in health and disease.
Prof. Brix is Academic Leader of the Technical University Hospital (TUH), a partnership between DTU and 16 hospitals where she is responsible for strengthening clinical–academic integration and advancing cross-disciplinary research infrastructures that link innovation, patient needs, and health technologies.
She is an elected member of the Danish Academy of Natural Sciences; chair of the Research Council for Technology and Production Sciences, The Independent Research Fund Denmark; and serves on several national and international steering committees, including the Million Microbiomes of Humans Project.

Prof. Siew Ng, MD PhD

Professor Siew Ng is the Croucher Professor in Medical Sciences and Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Prof. Ng is globally renowned as a pioneer, innovator, and leader in inflammatory bowel disease and microbiome medicine. She is also Director of the Microbiota I-Center (MagIC) and co-founder of two biotechnology companies that develop first-in-class microbiome diagnostics and therapeutics. She received her Doctor of Medicine degree from St Bartholomew’s and the Royal London School of Medicine and her Doctor of Philosophy from Imperial College London. Prof. Ng discovered novel microbial signatures for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and neurodevelopmental disorders in children. She also led a multinational study involving 30 countries and 100 centers across the Asia-Pacific region to investigate IBD epidemiology and pathogenesis.
Prof. Ng has published over 450 papers in leading journals, including Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, and The Lancet. She was elected a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea and is the first female clinician-scientist to receive the New Cornerstone Investigator award in mainland China. She has also received the Bank of China Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Prize. Prof. Ng has been named a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate and ranked among the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University for six consecutive years since 2020. In 2019, she was awarded the Joanna and David Sachar International Award and Visiting Professorship at Mount Sinai, New York, as well as the Sir Francis Avery Jones Award and Visiting Professorship at St Mark’s Hospital, London. She also received the Cleveland Clinic IBD Global Visiting Professorship in 2021.

Prof. Ellen Blaak, PhD

Prof. Ellen Blaak is Professor in Human Biology at the Department of Human Biology of Maastricht University Medical Center+ since 2007. Her research focuses on Interorgan crosstalk in the aetiology of obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus (>370 articles) as well as the impact of (precision) nutrition intervention in the prevention of these non-communicable diseases. She is member of the Nutrition committee of the Dutch Health Council and of several advisory board/grant evaluation committees. She is a clavariate highly cited author (in the top 1% by citations) in the year 2021-2025. She obtained funding from among others the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific research/Dutch Diabetes Research Foundation/EU as a PI for more than 35 research projects. She coordinates several precision nutrition consortia within large public-private partnerships and is a partner (PI) in several EU-consortia. She has supervised 40 PhD theses.

Prof. Karsten Kristiansen, PhD

Karsten Kristiansen is Professor of Molecular Biology and heads the Laboratory of Integrative Biomedicine at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen. He is also Professor and Director at BGI-Research, Shenzhen, China, and the Institute of Metagenomics, Qingdao-Europe Advanced Institute for Life Sciences, Qingdao, China. After graduation from the University of Copenhagen, he held research positions at the Max-Planck-Institut für Molekulare Genetik in Berlin and at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Fondation Edmond de Rothschild, in Paris. He was full professor and head of Department of Molecular Biology, later Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, 1992-2008, before he was recruited as professor and Head of the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen in 2008. Professor Kristiansen was the coordinator of the Danish Pangenome Project. Central themes of the research of Professor Kristiansen include the interaction between different nutrients in modulating energy homeostasis and how interactions between the host genome, the host immune system, and the gut microbiota regulate gut health and host metabolism and how such knowledge can be exploited for the discovery of novel probiotics. He has published more than 500 articles, of which many are in high-ranking journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell. He is a WoS Clarivate highly cited researcher.

Prof. Tahmeed Ahmed, MD

Dr Tahmeed Ahmed has been working for the last four decades to simplify the treatment of maternal and childhood malnutrition and diarrheal diseases. He developed a treatment protocol for children hospitalized with severe malnutrition and diarrhea, that reduced death rates by 47%. He also developed a ready-to-use therapeutic food, called Sharnali, made of locally available food ingredients. This therapeutic food is a remedy for severe acute malnutrition that affects more than 14 million children worldwide and about 350,000 children in Bangladesh. He worked with Dr Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis on the microbiota-directed complementary food (MDCF) – a novel intervention for childhood malnutrition. Dr Ahmed obtained his medical degree from Mymensingh Medical College, Bangladesh, and PhD from the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Dr Ahmed was recently named in the TIME2025 list of 100 individuals who influenced Global Health. He has more than 700 articles published in international journals and books. He is Executive Director of icddr,b and Professor of Public Health Nutrition of James P. Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka.

Tushar Matta, MS Pharm

2026 Gregor Reid Award for Outstanding Scholars in Developing Nations Winner: Tushar Matta is a Ph.D. researcher at the National Agri-Food and Biomanufacturing Institute (NABI), Mohali, India, with a research focus on probiotics, postbiotics, and microbiota-gut-brain axis interactions. His doctoral work centers on indigenously isolated GABA-producing probiotic strains, including their genomic characterization, multi-tier safety assessment through in silico, in vitro, and in vivo approaches, and optimization of postbiotic production. He is also developing millet bran-based synbiotic formulations to investigate mechanistic pathways underlying gut-brain health modulation and their potential therapeutic applications in epilepsy. He has a background in neuropharmacology and integrates microbiology, molecular biology, and functional food research to design translational probiotic strategies with clinical relevance. During his Ph.D., he has published four peer-reviewed research articles and filed one patent, reflecting his commitment to innovation-driven research. His work particularly emphasizes neuroactive microbial metabolites and their role in modulating host physiology. He is committed to advancing evidence-based probiotic science and translating microbiome research into clinically and industrially applicable solutions.

Dr. Gabriela Macedo Fraiz, PhD

2026 Glenn Gibson Early Career Researcher Award Winner: Gabriela Fraiz is a nutrition scientist with an MSc and a PhD in Nutrition Science obtained through a dual-degree program between the Federal University of Viçosa (Brazil) and the University of Navarra (Spain). Her research focuses on diet–microbiota–host interactions, particularly the effects of green tea kombucha and healthy dietary patterns on gut and oral microbiota, inflammation, and metabolic health. She has experience conducting randomized controlled trials, microbiome analysis, and metabolomics, with an emphasis on translating scientific evidence into practical and applicable nutritional strategies. Gabriela actively contributes to peer-reviewed publications and scientific conferences. Her main research interests include precision nutrition and the integration of multi-omics approaches to better understand how dietary interventions, including fermented foods, can improve cardiometabolic outcomes.

Dr. Frank A. Duca, PhD

Dr. Frank Duca is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology. He obtained his PhD from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 2013, examining the impact of high-fat diets and obesity on gut-brain signaling and the gut microbiome. He was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, under the mentorship of Dr. Tony Lam, where he examined how high-fat diets or metformin can directly, and indirectly via the gut microbiome, impact hepatic glucose production through a neuronal gut-brain-liver axis. At the University of Minnesota, his lab is currently focused on how dietary and environmental exposures can impact gut-brain signaling mechanisms that regulate metabolic homeostasis. His lab is especially interested in how changes in the gut microbiome and metabolome can influence the development of metabolic dysregulation via alterations in intestinal nutrient-sensing, vagal signaling, and the central nervous system. The Duca lab studies how alterations in both the small and large intestinal microbiota can be a factor and treatment for metabolic diseases via direct host-microbe interactions, as well as through the production of bacterially derived metabolites that can have an impact locally in the intestine, as well as peripherally, at the liver and brain.

Prof. David Mills, PhD

2026 Sanders Award for Advancing Biotic Science: David A. Mills is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California at Davis. Dr. Mills studies the molecular biology and ecology of bacteria that play an active role in gut health. At UC Davis Dr. Mills has mentored over 32 graduate students and postdocs generating over 240 publications including seminal work on lactic acid bacterial and bifidobacterial genetics and genomics. Dr. Mills helped create the UC Davis “Milk Group”, a consortium of researchers who investigate and translate the uniquely beneficial aspects of human and bovine milk. Professor Mills was named the Peter J. Shields Chair in Dairy Food Science in 2012, in 2015 he was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology and in 2023 he was named a UC Davis Distinguished Professor. Dr. Mills’s research has helped launch several startup companies

The expert panel “Clinical translation of biotic science: How can we enhance impact for clinical practice?” will include the following speakers.

ISAPP Discussion Groups will include the following experts.

Group 1

Shijie Cao
Michael Gänzle
Carol Johnston
Haruki Kitazawa
Guy Vergères

Group 2

Premysl Bercik
André Marette
Liam O’Mahony
Vanessa Sperandio

Group 3

Jean-Paul Pirnay
Nathaniel Ritz
Torben Sølbeck Rasmussen

Group 4

Matthew Amicucci
Clara Cho
Sean Gibbons
Elaine Holmes
Bruce Y. Lee
Sara Martini
Kim Watson

Group 5

Jonathan Chapman
Magali Cordaillat-Simmons
Karen Madsen
Siobhan McCormack
Jacques Ravel

Group 6

Kjersti Aagaard
Howard Bauchner
Jose Clemente (virtual)
Eldin Jasarevic
Katri Korpela (pre-recorded)
Daniel Merenstein
Anne Salonen
Mary Ellen Sanders
Daniel Tancredi