Dr. CJ Guo. Credit: Ashley Jones
Dr. Chun-Jun (“C.J.”) Guo, an assistant professor of immunology in medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and scientist at the Jill Roberts Institute for Research In Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Weill Cornell Medicine, has won a Director’s New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for an ambitious project to detail how the hundreds of different bacterial species living in the human gut contribute to human health and disease.
The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, part of the NIH Common Fund, was established in 2007 to support “exceptionally creative early-career investigators who propose innovative, high-impact projects.” The award provides $1.5 million up-front to scientists, plus additional funds for university overhead costs, and is intended to support research programs lasting five years. Dr. Guo is among 60 scientists nationwide to receive the prestigious award this year.
“I’m very grateful for this award,” Dr. Guo said. “It provides my lab with a unique and exciting opportunity to pursue high-risk, high-reward research that would not get funding through traditional NIH grant mechanisms.”
Dr. Guo is an expert on the genetic manipulation of gut microbes. The diverse population of microbes in the human gut—the gut “microbiome”—has become a major focus of research in the past decade, as scientists have recognized it as a factor in major illnesses including inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, diabetes and cancer. But determining in molecular detail what the roughly 1,000 species of gut microbes do to trigger disease or help maintain human health is an enormous undertaking. To read more, click here.