Peter J. Turnbaugh, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology with the G.W. Hooper Research Foundation at the University of California, San Francisco. He is formerly a Bauer Fellow in the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University. Since 2004, his research has focused on the metabolic activities performed by the trillions of microbes that colonize our adult bodies. Turnbaugh and his research group combine metagenomics and gnotobiotics (germ-free and intentionally-colonized mice) to study the impact of the gut microbiome on nutrition and drug metabolism. He received a B.A. in Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology from Whitman College and a Ph.D. in microbial genomics from Washington University in Saint Louis.
