Session 4 - Gut Microbiota, Metabolic Health and the Gut-Brain Axis (09:30 - 11:35 hr)
Session Chair:
Prof Patricia Conway, Singapore Centre for Environmental and Life Sciences Engineering, Singapore
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Prof Patricia Conway, Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, Singapore
Prof Patricia Conway is Visiting Professor of the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE), Singapore and CEO of PC Biome Pte Ltd. She was Professor at the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and in the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Food Technology Centre, NTU. She has extensive research and industry R&D experience, including authorship on over 100 scientific papers in international journals, monographs or book chapters, and numerous plenary or keynote lectures at international meetings. She is inventor on over 20 patent applications and Principal Investigator on grants in Sweden, Australia and Singapore. Prof Conway’s research interests are gastrointestinal microbiology, functional foods including probiotics and prebiotics. She has a particular focus on bacterial colonization of the gastrointestinal tract and mechanisms of bacterial adhesion, pathogen inhibition and immune modulation in animals and humans in order to develop ways of modulating the microbiome for health.
Dr Kazuyuki Kasahara is Assistant Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focuses on the gut microbiome, investigating the diet-microbe-host interactions and their impacts on cardiometabolic and vascular diseases, including metabolic syndrome, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and atherosclerosis. His lab employs various microbiome research techniques such as anaerobic culture, sequencing, animal models, and clinical cohorts to discover novel biomarkers and therapeutics. Dr Kasahara earned his M.D. from Kobe University, Japan, and completed his medical training in cardiology. He then obtained his Ph.D. from the Kobe Graduate School of Medicine, Japan, where he studied T-cell immune responses related to cardiovascular diseases. He completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where he explored connections between diet-microbiome interactions and cardiometabolic diseases.
Prof Yulan Wang is Professor of Metabolomics at LKCMedicine, NTU, Singapore and Director of Singapore Phenome Centre. She also has an honorary appointment with the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, UK. She developed advanced metabonomics techniques for biomarker discovery of various of diseases and applied to study impact of nutritional intervention and gut microbiome-host interaction. Prof Wang obtained her PhD from University of East Anglia, UK, her postdoctoral research in the Institute of Food Research and John Innes Center, UK, and was research fellow at Imperial College London. She was recruited as part of China’s “100 talents program” by the Chinese Academy of Science as Professor at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, where she used NMR and LC-MS spectroscopic techniques with computational modelling to investigate the metabolic effects of infectious diseases and nutritional interventions.
Dr Tan Hwei Ee is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellow/ Nanyang Assistant Professor at LKCMedicine, NTU. His gut-brain neurobiology program investigates the bidirectional brain-body neural circuits in mice, to unravel the dialogues among our microbes, gut, and brain. Dr Tan studied Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California – Berkeley, and did further training at Osaka University, Fudan University, and A*STAR. He obtained his Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he uncovered the neural basis of sugar and fat cravings, and then worked as an independent fellow jointly at A*STAR and NTU. He made landmark discoveries on the neural basis of sugar and fat cravings. His widely highlighted publications in Nature uncovered novel gut-brain circuits underlying sugar’s highly appetitive effects, providing an explanation as to why simply activating the sweet senses on the tongue (as artificial sweeteners do) fail to substitute for our sugar craving; in addition, he also discovered how pathways from the intestines to the brain drive our behavioural preference for dietary fats.
Prof Yeong Yeh Lee is a Professor of Medicine and Consultant of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Internal Medicine at Universiti Sains Malaysia. After his gastroenterology fellowship, he completed his Ph.D. in Glasgow, United Kingdom, and later a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States. He is currently the Editor of BMC Gastroenterology, PeerJ, and the Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences. He has published more than 300 papers in high-impact journals including Gastroenterology and Gut. He was awarded Top Research Scientist by the Academy of Sciences Malaysia in 2018 and Outstanding Young Malaysian Award by JCI Malaysia in 2015. His current research interests include gut microbiota, neurogastroenterology, functional gastrointestinal disorders, gastroesophageal reflux disease, obesity, and endoscopy. Currently, he is Immediate Past President of the Malaysian Society of Gastroenterology & Hepatology.