Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello
Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello (born December 3, 1959) is an American microbial ecologist that has worked on adaptations of gut fermentation organs in animals, gastric colonization by bacteria, assembly of the microbiota in early life, effect of practices that reduce microbiota transmission and colonization in humans, and effect of urbanization. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Microbiome and Health at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the Director of the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health. Her lab at Rutgers collaborates in multidisciplinary science, integrating microbiology, immunology, pediatrics, nutrition, anthropology, environmental engineering and  architecture/urban studies, and microbial ecology. Research and service. Dominguez Bello first proposed the idea of restoring the microbiota in C-section born neonates -void of the natural maternal birth canal microbes. She ran the first observational trial and is now involved in a randomized clinical trial to determine effects of restoring natural microbes at birth, on the baby health. She pioneered work showing the loss of human microbiome diversity and change of environmental home microbial exposures associated with urbanization and initiated the efforts to preserve the global human microbiome diversity in a Microbiota Vault, a repository for the future  health of humanity. She became fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Fellow (FIDSA) in 2008, member of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2013. In 2015 she received the Arturo Carrion Award from the Puerto Rico Society of Microbiology and became member of the Academy of Sciences of Latin America (ACAL) in 2019 she became fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program in Humans & the Microbiome. An advocate for using technology that respects nature, she also has promoted since 2019 the creation of Baby Friendly Spaces (BFS) at work, as a way to improve maternal  and infant health, with direct breastfeeding by working mothers, and is a member of the NJ Breastfeeding Coalition. Education and work. She was born in Caracas, Venezuela on 3 December 1959, went to University Simon Bolivar in Caracas, and did graduate studies in Aberdeen University, Scotland, and a Postdoc in INRA-Theix, France. She worked at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research until 2002. She worked at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan from 2002 to 2012, at New York University from 2012 to 2017, and is currently a professor at Rutgers University, and a leading member of  Rutgers University Microbiome Program (RUMP).