Having IMPACTT 6:
Advancing Microbiome Research
Sept 28-30, 2026
Speaker Profiles
Keynote Speakers
Jennifer Wargo, MD, MMSc
University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA
R. Lee Clark Endowed Professor
Departments of Surgical Oncology & Genomic Medicine
Founder and Leader, Platform for Innovative Microbiome and Translational Research
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Member, National Academy of Medicine
Dr. Jennifer Wargo is an internationally recognized physician-scientist whose career has been dedicated to advancing the understanding and treatment of cancer through innovative translational research. With a profound commitment to bridging science and patient care, Dr. Wargo’s work has fundamentally reshaped approaches to cancer therapy, setting new paradigms in the fields of immunotherapy, targeted therapy, and microbiome research.
Dr. Wargo earned her medical degree and completed surgical residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where she developed a keen interest in cancer biology and therapy. During her training, she completed two fellowships in surgical oncology with a focus on cancer immunotherapy, laying the foundation for her impactful career. In 2008, she was recruited to join the faculty in the Division of Surgical Oncology at MGH, where she established a translational research laboratory aimed at understanding response and resistance to treatment in melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and other malignancies. Her pioneering work during this time demonstrated that molecularly targeted therapy could sensitize tumor cells to immunotherapy, providing a scientific rationale for combining these treatment modalities—a strategy now being evaluated in clinical trials with promising outcomes.
In 2013, Dr. Wargo was recruited to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to help lead the institution’s Melanoma Moonshot efforts. Today, she serves as a Professor of Surgical Oncology and Genomic Medicine and leads the Platform for Innovative Microbiome and Translational Research (PRIME-TR). Her groundbreaking research continues to focus on enhancing cancer therapies through targeted therapy, immunotherapy, and modulation of the gut and tumor microbiome. Recognized globally for her discoveries, Dr. Wargo has made paradigm- and practice-changing contributions to understanding how the microbiome influences cancer treatment responses. Her team’s work has shown that diet, particularly a high-fiber intake, and strategies modulating gut microbes can improve patient outcomes—insights that have spurred new clinical trials and opened an entirely new field of research.
Throughout her career, Dr. Wargo has identified novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets that have been widely published in leading journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Science, Cell, Cancer Discovery, and Lancet Oncology. She pioneered the use of neoadjuvant targeted therapy and immune checkpoint blockade in melanoma and other cancers and co-founded the International Neoadjuvant Melanoma Consortium to further collaborative progress in the field.
Dr. Wargo’s contributions to understanding the immune effects of targeted therapy, especially in melanoma, have been instrumental in defining mechanisms of treatment resistance and developing strategies to overcome them. Early in her career, she co-authored seminal papers that identified resistance mechanisms to BRAF-targeted therapies, and she led efforts to collect longitudinal tumor biopsies and blood samples for deep molecular analyses—work that enabled the discovery of numerous resistance pathways and informed new therapeutic strategies.
As a dedicated collaborator and inspirational servant leader, Dr. Wargo is deeply committed to working with investigators across disciplines and around the world to develop innovative strategies to treat, intercept, and ultimately prevent cancer. Her visionary research continues to push the boundaries of cancer science, improving the lives of patients worldwide.
Plenary Speakers
Arielle Elkrief, MD, FRCPC
Université de Montréal, CHUM Microbiome Centre, Canada
Associate Professor of Hemo-Oncology, Universtiy of Montreal (CHUM)
Co-Director of the CHUM Microbiome Centre
Dr. Arielle Elkrief, MD, FRCPC is a physician–scientist (FRQS J1), Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Oncology at the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), and Co-Director of the CHUM Microbiome Centre. She leads a translational research program with the goal of developing microbiome-based therapeutic strategies to enhance the efficacy of anticancer immunotherapy. Her lab integrates clinical trials, preclinical models, and computational oncology to design and test novel microbiome-based interventions and biomarkers. She has authored more than 94 peer-reviewed publications. Her contributions have been recognized through the American Society of Clinical Oncology Young Investigator Award, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer Women in Melanoma Award, the Terry Fox Young Investigator Award, and the Gairdner Young Investigator Award.
Pablo Romagnoli, PhD
Instituto Universitario de Ciencias Biomédicas de Córdoba, Argentina
Pablo A. Romagnoli is an Adjunct Investigator at CONICET and Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones en Medicina Traslacional “Severo R. Amuchástegui” (CIMETSA), Instituto Universitario de Ciencias Biomédicas de Córdoba (IUCBC) in Córdoba, Argentina. He earned his Ph.D. in Immunology and Molecular Pathogenesis from Emory University (Atlanta, GA, USA) and completed his postdoctoral training at UCONN Health (Farmington, CT, USA), where he studied mucosal immunity and resident memory CD4 and γδ T cells. His current research explores how diet, IgG-coated microbiota and metabolism contribute to intestinal inflammation and IBD pathogenesis, the role of tryptophan metabolites in intestinal mucosal homeostasis, and the interplay of microbiota, metabolism, and malnutrition during early pregnancy. He is also an active participant in the JAGUAR project, mapping immune cell diversity across Latin America.
Francesca Ronchi, PhD
Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Institute of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Immunology (I-MIDI), Germany
Francesca Ronchi is Professor of Microbiology and Microbiome Research (W2, tenure-track) at the Institute of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Immunology (I-MIDI), Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin. She obtained her PhD in 2011 at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (Bellinzona, Switzerland) and Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele (Milan, Italy) under the mentorship of Prof. Federica Sallusto. She completed her postdoctoral training and subsequently served as Senior Scientist at the University of Bern in the labs of Prof. Kathy D McCoy and Prof. Andrew J Macpherson respectively, before being appointed to her current professorship in 2021.
Her research focuses on neuro-immune interactions and host-microbiota crosstalk at mucosal interfaces. She investigates how microbial signals, environmental factors such as diet, and immune pathways shape systemic immunity, central nervous system function, and neurobehavioral outcomes. Her work combines gnotobiotic models, immunological profiling, microbiome analysis, and functional behavioural assessments to uncover mechanistic links between the gut microbiota and chronic inflammatory, autoimmune, and neuroimmune diseases.
Dr. Ronchi has made significant contributions to understanding how low-abundance commensal bacteria regulate immune responses, how diet shapes IgA-mediated mucosal immunity, and how microbiota-driven immune pathways influence central nervous system autoimmunity. Her work has provided conceptual and methodological advances in the study of microbiota-immune-brain interactions.
Her research aims to translate mechanistic insights into microbiota-immune interactions into novel strategies for the prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and neurological disorders.
Luigi Nezi, PhD
Istituto Europeo di Oncologia, Microbiome and Antitumor Immunity Group, Italy
My research explores how information from the environment – including microbiota and metabolites – modulates the immune response against tumors and their sensitivity to Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (ICI). While obtaining my master’s degree, I was trained as a cellular biologist, with expertise in cell migration and extracellular matrix remodeling. As a doctoral student (Molecular Medicine program at SEMM, Univ. of Milan, IT) I combined structural biology with biochemistry and yeast genetic to study the mechanism that coordinates mitotic progression with chromosome alignment during cell division. My interest on molecular mechanisms driving tumorigenesis brought me to the Harvard Medical School (Boston MA, USA), where I contributed to describe, for the first time, the mechanistic link between mitotic errors, DNA damage, and aneuploidy, leading to chromothripsis. Then, I moved to MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX USA) to learn how to translate tumors vulnerabilities into opportunities for clinical improvement. Finally, joining Dr. Wargo’s lab, I sought to begin defining my own research path in the field of melanoma immunotherapy and clinical microbiome studies. My contribution has been crucial to address the immunomodulatory impact of a “favorable” microbiome on ICI – leading to milestone publications in the field (Gopalakrishnan V*, Spencer C*, Nezi L* et al Science 2018 *equal contribution; Spencer et al. Science 2021; Andrews, et al. Nat Med 2021).
Since I started my own group in 2018 at Istituto Europeo di Oncologia (IEO, Milan IT), my research leverages clinical studies to define microbial and metabolic determinants of the gut microbiota-host interplay (Sambruni et al Genome Med 2023; Macandog et al Cell Host & Microbes 2024) and validate them on innovative in vitro and in pre-clinical models (Ballerini et al Nat Biomed Eng 2024; Palma et al Biofabrication 2024).
Melody Smith, MD, MS
Stanford University, School of Medicine, Division of Blood and Marrow Transplantation & Cellular Therapy, USA
Dr. Melody Smith began her academic journey at Vanderbilt University, where she earned a BS in Spanish and Biology. She earned an MD with Distinction in Research and completed her Internal Medicine residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Subsequently, she completed a fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK).
During her fellowship and as a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Smith conducted research at MSK under the mentorship of Dr. Marcel van den Brink and Dr. Michel Sadelain, focusing on the biology of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. During her postdoctoral training, she earned a Master of Science in Clinical and Translational Investigation from Weill Cornell.
Dr. Smith joined Stanford University School of Medicine in 2021, where she established her independent lab. Her research focuses on cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic factors that impact CAR T cell activity. She studies allogeneic CAR T cells in mouse models and investigates how the intestinal microbiome affects CAR T cell responses. She is the IND sponsor for a Phase I clinical trial (NCT05507827) aimed at reducing relapse in patients with high-risk B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia by combining allo-HCT with allogeneic CAR T cell therapy.
Alberto Caminero, PhD
McMaster University, Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute, Canada
Dr. Alberto Caminero is an Associate Professor at the Farncombe Institute at McMaster University. Born and raised in Spain, he trained as a microbiologist at the University of León (Spain). In 2014, he moved to Canada to pursue postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Elena Verdu at McMaster University, where he specialized in gnotobiotic and mouse models of inflammation and food sensitivity. In 2016, he joined the Farncombe Institute as a faculty member. His research program focuses on diet–microbiota interactions and their role in inflammatory bowel disease and food sensitivities.
Thomas Clavel, Dr. rer. nat.
University Hospital of RWTH Aachen, Institute of Medical Microbiology, Germany
Thomas Clavel is a Professor in Microbiology at the University Hospital of RWTH Aachen in Germany. His research combines molecular, cultivation, and gnotobiology approaches to investigate human and animal gut microbiomes, with a focus on microbial diversity and the study of microbial functions underlying microbe-host interactions. A specific interest is to use innovative anaerobic cultivation approaches combined with bioinformatics to discover and describe novel microbes and their genes, and to develop microbiome-based interventions based on cultured isolates. Tom has served in various editorial roles with microbiology journals and in grant review panels for many years. His international team is dedicated to the FAIR principles in science and strives to make research more sustainable.
After studying at the University of Toulouse and at Agro Campus in Rennes, France, Thomas obtained his master’s degree in September 2002, after a research project on the human gut microbiota and functional food in the laboratory of Joël Doré, INRAE, Jouy-en-Josas. He then moved to the lab of Michael Blaut (DIfE, Postdam, Germany) to work on his PhD thesis about the isolation and characterization of polyphenol-metabolizing bacteria from the human gut. From 2006 to 2017, he was postdoctoral fellow working on microbe-host interactions, then junior group leader and head of the microbiome sequencing facility at ZIEL Institute for Food and Health, all under the mentoring of Dirk Haller (TU Munich, Freising, Germany). In 2017 he moved to Aachen to start his own group of Functional Microbiome Research within the Institute of Medical Microbiology (Mathias Hornef) at the University Hospital of RWTH Aachen.
Alexandre Almeida, PhD
University of Cambridge, Department of Veterinary Medicine, UK
Alex is a Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a research group focused on understanding the human microbiome’s role in health and disease. He completed his BSc and MSc in Biochemistry and Forensic Genetics from the University of Porto in Portugal, before moving to Paris in 2013 to pursue a PhD at the Institut Pasteur. In 2017, Alex joined the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Fellow, developing new computational methods to analyze the human gut microbiome. His work led to the identification of thousands of as-yet uncultivated bacteria and viruses in the gut microbiome, and the generation of a public genome catalog that has become widely used today. Since 2022, Alex has held an MRC Career Development Award fellowship at the University of Cambridge to lead a team dedicated to characterizing the relevance of this newly uncovered microbial diversity to human health and disease.
Maziar Divangahi, PhD
McGill University, Department of Pathology, Canada
Bio
social
website
Gretchen Diehl, PhD
Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, US
Bio
social
website