Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Professor and the Peter J. Shields Endowed Chair in the Departments of Food Science & Technology at the University of California at Davis
Biography
Dr. Mills studies the molecular biology and ecology of bacteria that play an active role in gut health or fermented foods and beverages. In the last 20 years Dr. Mills has mentored over 30 graduate students and postdocs and published more than 150 papers, including seminal work on lactic acid bacterial and bifidobacterial genomics. At UC Davis, Dr. Mills has worked to define, investigate and translate the beneficial aspects of human milk and its role in human health. Dr. Mills has previously served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the American Society for Microbiology and currently serves as an editor for the journals Frontiers in Microbiology and mSystems. In 2010 Dr. Mills was awarded the Cargill Flavor Systems Specialties Award from the American Dairy Science Association. In 2012 he was named the Peter J. Shields Chair in Dairy Food Science and in 2015 he was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology. Dr. Mills also serves on the Science/Research Advisory Boards of several food and health-focused companies and his research has helped launch two start up companies.
Talk
Restoring Ecosystem Function in the Infant Microbiome
Breast milk contains complex sugars that enrich specific bacterial functions in the infant gut. However, many infants in developed countries do not obtain these functions via normal transfer from their environment. By restoring specific bacteria after birth, we can restore proper ecosystem function of the breast fed infant microbiome.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2017 Silicon Valley
Session Synopsis: As the pace of investigations into the relationship between the human microbiome and disease states increases, new tools to interrogate and manipulate the microbiome are routinely reported. Several of these advances will be described in this session.
