Nutrition and gut health pioneer Justin Sonnenburg to present 2025 Healthy Lion Award lecture

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Department of Food Science and One Health Microbiome Center in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences will host the upcoming Healthy Lion Award Lecture, featuring Justin Sonnenburg, a pioneer in human gut health and microbiome science.

Sonnenburg is author of "The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health," and an expert featured in a MasterClass and Netflix Documentary on gut health. He is currently the Alex and Susie Algard Endowed Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

His lecture is titled "Gut Microbiome Industrialization and the Rise of Chronic Inflammatory Disease" and will be held 11 a.m.–noon on March 28, in Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library, University Park campus. The lecture is open to the public, and all are welcome to attend.

The Sonnenburg Lab’s groundbreaking research explores the dynamic relationship between the gut microbiome, diet and human health, with a particular focus on how industrialization reshaped the microbial communities within us. His work demonstrated that the gut microbiome is highly malleable and profoundly influenced by lifestyle and diet, suggesting that by understanding the rules of microbiome manipulation, we may develop new strategies for preventing and treating disease. 

His studies of diverse human populations, from hunter-gatherer societies to industrialized nations, have revealed that modern gut microbiomes diverged significantly from their ancestral states, losing microbial species and functions that were once integral to human biology. This loss, coupled with the introduction of new taxa, may create incompatibilities between the industrialized microbiome and human physiology, contributing to the increasing prevalence of chronic inflammatory diseases.

Diet is one of the most powerful tools for shaping the gut microbiome, and the Sonnenburg lab has conducted extensive dietary intervention trials in U.S. cohorts to better understand the diet-microbiome-health axis. His team has set out to use diet, in combination with bacterial genetic engineering, to facilitate the engraftment of beneficial microbes into the gut, a potential breakthrough for microbiome-based therapeutics. This research provides crucial insights into how diet, inflammation and microbial metabolism interact to shape human health.