Dr. Liping Zhao is currently the Eveleigh-Fenton Chair of Applied Microbiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and the Director of the Center for Nutrition, Microbiome and Health of the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health at Rutgers University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He serves on Scientific Advisory Board for the Center for Microbiome Research and Education of the American Gastroenterology Association (AGA).
His team has pioneered the approach of applying metagenomics-metabolomics integrated tools and dietary intervention for systems understanding and predictive manipulation of gut microbiota to improve human metabolic health. Following the logic of Koch’s postulates, Liping has found that endotoxin-producing opportunistic pathogens overgrowing in the obese human gut can induce obesity, fatty liver and insulin resistance when mono-colonized in germfree mice via the endotoxin-TLR4 pathway as the initiating molecular crosstalk. Their clinical trials published in Science and EBioMedicine showed that high dietary fiber modulation of gut microbiota can significantly alleviate metabolic diseases including a genetic form of obesity in children and type 2 diabetes in adults. His team developed a reference-free and ecology-based pipeline for microbiome data analysis. Science magazine featured a story on how Liping combines traditional Chinese medicine and gut microbiota study to understand and fight obesity.
