HMI'25 Invited Speakers

Nelly Amenyogbe, PhD

Dr. Nelly Amenyogbe is a postdoctoral fellow with the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Dalhousie University. Dr. Amenyogbe completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia and continued her research at The Kids Institute of Australia in Perth, funded by the Raine Medical Foundation.

Throughout our lifespan, pregnancy and the newborn period carry a heightened risk to suffer from severe infections, especially in low-resource settings where disease burden is the highest. However, understanding the determinants of immune resilience (or what host factors determine a positive vs. undesired infectious outcome) can deliver effective and affordable ways to prevent suffering from infectious disease.  Amenyogbe’s previous research showed how BCG, the vaccine against tuberculosis, reduces risk to die from newborn sepsis within days of being given. Current projects build on these initial observations to identify how host metabolism influences the immune response to infection, especially colostrum feeding for newborns, which may influence the efficacy of immune-targeting therapies. These research questions are answered using preclinical models, and multi-omics surveys of maternal and neonatal immune responses. Dr. Amenyogbe's research is currently funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Open Philanthropy.

Carrie L Byington, MD

Dr. Byington is a Professor of Pediatrics and Infectious Diseases at UC San Diego. She is the emeritus Executive Vice President (EVP) for University of California Health (UCH), the largest academic health system in the US, with 12 hospitals, six academic health centers, 20 health professional schools, and more than 100,000 employees across California. In the EVP role, she was responsible for both the UC COVID-19 response and advancing the public service mission of UCH. She currently serves as the Special Advisor for Health Security to the University of California President. Dr. Byington’s research expertise is related to respiratory pathogens, especially those with pandemic potential. She works to address threats to health security including pandemics and health disparities and believes equitable access to human milk can help mitigate both. She is a faculty member of the UCSD Pandemic Response to Emerging Pathogens, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Equity (PREPARE) Institute, the Human Milk Institute (HMI), and an advisor to the UC Health Milk Bank.

Christina Chambers, PhD, MPH

Dr. Chambers is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine at UC San Diego. She is Chief of the Division of Environmental Science and Health, and Co-Director of the Center for Better Beginnings. She is the principal investigator of MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies, and the UC San Diego Human Milk Research Biorepository, two nation-wide longitudinal cohort studies focused on the safety of medications, vaccines, substances, infectious agents, and other environmental exposures in pregnancy and lactation. Dr. Chambers co-directs the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study (HBCD), a nationwide research initiative focused on developmental trajectories of children in various environments from prenatal life through 10 years of age. In addition, Dr. Chambers leads research and educational initiatives in the U.S. and internationally on the prevention and treatment of children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders. She co-directs the Center for Population Science and Community Engagement in the Clinical and Translational Research Institute at UC San Diego which supports clinical research development in diverse populations.

Camille Fabiyi, PhD, MPH

James Friend, PhD

Dr. Friend leads the Medically Advanced Devices Laboratory in the Center for Medical Devices at the University of California, San Diego. He holds the Stanford S. and Beverly P. Penner Endowed Chair in Engineering and is a professor in both the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Jacobs School of Engineering and the Department of Surgery, School of Medicine. He spent 14 years abroad as a faculty member in Japan and Australia before returning to the US. His research interests are principally in exploring and exploiting acoustic phenomena at small scales, mainly for biomedical applications. He currently supervises a team of 7 PhD students. Over the years, he has published over 350 peer-reviewed research publications, with 203 journal papers and 9 book chapters (H-factor = 60), and has 30 granted patents, completed 36 postgraduate students and supervised 23 postdoctoral staff, and been awarded over $32 million in competitive grant-based research funding. He most recently helped found Latchability, an infant health diagnostics company, GlideNeuro, an endovascular intervention technology company, and Sonocharge Energy, a rapidly rechargeable battery company which has grown to a valuation of $70M. Among other awards, he received UCSD's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2021, was noted as a highly cited author of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry from 2022, a Fellow of the IEEE from 2018, a Keck Fellow in 2018-21, and was awarded the IEEE Carl Hellmuth Hertz Ultrasonics Award from the IEEE in 2015.

Rebecca Hoban, MD, MPH

Dr. Hoban is Associate Professor in the Division of Neonatology at the University bof Washington in Seattle. She brings extensive international clinical, educational, and training experiences from a dozen countries, has been an invited speaker on breastfeeding topics locally and internationally, and is active in clinical and translational human milk research. Dr. Hoban's current research and projects include improving term human milk provision in the high-risk neonatal population, milk biomarkers to predict lactation success, inflammatory markers in human milk, and human milk as potential stem cell therapy in premature infants with intraventricular hemorrhage.

Tricia J Johnson, PhD

Dr. Johnson is a professor in the Department of Health Systems Management at RUSH University. Her primary scientific interest is in understanding the economic drivers of health care spending. She is one of very few human milk economists in the world and specializes in the economics and cost effectiveness of human milk feedings to premature infants. Additionally, she leads the economic evaluation of multiple research studies with the goal of identifying strategies that are cost effective for improving health outcomes and reducing costs to society. Johnson is the research director for the US Cooperative for International Patient Programs, a membership program of the National Center for Healthcare Leadership.

Kotaro J. Kaneko, PhD

Dr. Kaneko is a reviewer and a team lead for the Toxicology Review Branch for the Division of Food Ingredients in the Office of Food Additive Safety/Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (now Human Foods Program) at the FDA. Dr. Kaneko has reviewed safety of food ingredients as well as safety of genetically engineered plants and cell cultured meat. Dr. Kaneko is the lead toxicologist for ingredients for infant formula use and have led and continues to lead FDA’s efforts to explore how to properly assess safety of new non-nutritive infant formula ingredients with potential bioactive and functional properties. Dr. Kaneko received his B.A. in Biology and Chemistry from Williams College (Williamstown, MA), and then received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, with research emphasis on molecular mechanism of estrogen receptor action. Before joining the FDA, Dr. Kaneko was a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child and Human Development at the NIH, with research emphasis on mouse development and stem cell biology.

Tobias Kollmann, MD, PhD

Dr. Kollmann completed his MD and PhD at the Albert of Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx NY, followed by a residency in pediatrics and fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA with Prof. Chris Wilson. He then served as Division Head for Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of British Columbia, BC Children’s Hospital before taking on the Director’s position of Systems Vaccinology at Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, Australia. He currently is Prof. of Microbiology & Immunology as well as Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS, Canada. Dr. Kollmann is the CEO of the Born Strong Initiative, a global network of experts working to reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes. His expertise centers around immune ontogeny as well as maternal and early life vaccine responses employing cutting edge technology and analytics to extract the most information out of the small biological samples obtainable.

Kaytlin Krutsch, PhD, PharmD, MBA, BCPS

Dr. Kaytlin Krutsch is a mother, researcher, and the director of the InfantRisk Center at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Her research specializes in the transfer of medications into breast milk, with a commitment to translating this knowledge into practical healthcare solutions. Dr. Krutsch believes mothers deserve more: better answers to their medication questions, healthcare experiences that foster respect, and encouragement that their health is equally as important as their child’s. At the InfantRisk Center, her goal is to listen to mothers' concerns, design research that addresses their questions, and create a comprehensive information cycle that empowers families.

In addition to her research, Dr. Krutsch co-authors Hale’s Medications and Mothers’ Milk with Dr. Thomas Hale, now in its twenty-first edition. She advises the Food and Drug Administration, the Human Milk Banking Association of Northern America, and pharmaceutical industry on lactation pharmacology and lactation research.

Sandra L Leibel, MD MSc

Dr. Leibel is an Associate Professor at UC San Diego, specializing in Neonatology and Pulmonary disease. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying acute lung injury after viral infection and the protective effects of human milk to reduce the severity of infections. Her work aims to translate innovative basic science discoveries into clinical therapies and diagnostics that can improve outcomes for vulnerable newborns.

Rachel Morissette, PhD

Dr. Rachel Morissette is a Biochemist and Regulatory Review Scientist in FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in the Office of Food Additive Safety, Division of Food Ingredients. She oversees the Infant Formula Review Team and handles regulatory and scientific reviews involving the safety evaluation of ingredients added to infant formula and foods in general. Dr. Morissette received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. She then went on to receive her Masters and Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her post-doctoral training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Aging studying cell signaling pathways in hereditary diseases of connective tissue. She joined the FDA in 2015 after serving as a Staff Scientist at the NIH Clinical Center, Pediatric Services division.

Amy L Non, PhD, MPH

Dr. Non is a Professor in the Anthropology Department at UC San Diego. As a molecular anthropologist, her research interests lie in exploring the genetic and sociocultural contributors to racial and social inequalities in health. Her lab investigates specifically how social experiences can become biologically embedded early in life to affect health throughout the life course. To do this, they explore epigenetic mechanisms, or modifications to the genome, that can link early adverse environmental exposures with altered gene expression, potentially resulting in long-term consequences for adult health and disease. One stream of her work investigates DNA methylation in relation to early life adversity in children of immigrants. More recently she has begun investigating variation in microRNAs in human milk in relation to maternal mental health and stress, as well as methodological approaches to isolating miRNA from exosomes in milk. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology and Masters in Public Health at the University of Florida, and trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow thorough the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program at Harvard University.

Kristin Palmsten, ScD

Dr. Palmsten is a Senior Research Investigator and Co-Director of the Pregnancy and Child Health Research Center at HealthPartners Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is also an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Palmsten earned her doctorate in Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego. She received a National Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Early Career Professional Achievement Award from the Coalition for Excellence in Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology.

Dr. Palmsten’s research focuses primarily on perinatal epidemiology, pharmacoepidemiology, and assessing medication and vaccine safety during pregnancy and lactation. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of three R01 studies funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that assess the impact of perinatal and postpartum medication and vaccine exposures on lactation-related outcomes using electronic health record data.

Leslie A Parker, PhD, RN

Dr. Parker is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Nursing at University of Florida. Her research involves nutritional support of the premature infant with an emphasis on breastfeeding infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Dr. Parker has been funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research to study (1) the risks and benefits of routine gastric residual aspiration and evaluation in very premature infants and (2) the optimal timing of initiation of milk expression following the delivery of a very premature infant. She recently received a 2018 Research Opportunity grant to study strategies to increase lactation success in mothers of extremely premature infants. She received a UF Term Professorship award in 2017.

Ravi M Patel, MD MSc

Dr. Patel is a Professor of Pediatrics and Director of Neonatal Clinical Research at Emory University and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. His research interests include necrotizing enterocolitis, neonatal transfusion medicine, and caffeine therapy. He is a principal investigator in the NICHD Neonatal Research Network and leads or participates in numerous multicenter studies. He is chair of the International Society for Evidence-Based Neonatology (EBNEO). He is also an executive committee member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Section on Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine and past-president of the Southern Society for Pediatric Research. Dr. Patel completed residency training at NYU School of Medicine and neonatal fellowship training and a Masters in Clinical Research at Emory University.

EA Quinn, PhD, MPH

Dr. Quinn is a biological anthropologist with a specialty in human biology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research is broadly focused on understanding the ways in which human milk is an essential part of human biological variation and how such variation has been selected for by different ecological pressures. She has conducted research on human milk composition and ecological pressures in the Philippines, Nepal, Ecuador, and the United States.

Rajini Rao, PhD

Dr. Rao is professor of physiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry (1988) at the University of Rochester, N.Y. and postdoctoral training in genetics at Yale University before being recruited to Johns Hopkins University as assistant professor in 1993. In 2004, Dr. Rao became the first woman professor in the 100+ year history of the physiology department. Dr. Rao’s laboratory investigates ion transporters, including secretory pathway Ca2+-ATPases and endosomal Na+/H+ exchangers, with a focus on their role in human disorders, ranging from cancer to neurodegeneration. Her molecules to medicine approach harnesses the range of available models: bacterial orthologs for structural insights, yeast for functional screening of human variants, 3D organoids and polarized cell lines for cell biological and transport studies, and mouse models and human databases for pathophysiological insights. Rao is an active educator and mentor, both outside and within Hopkins where she has been recognized with the professor’s award for preclinical teaching and teacher of the year award from the graduate student association. As director of the NIGMS-funded T32 Ph.D. training program in cellular & molecular medicine, she has developed curricular resources for teaching rigor and reproducibility, grant writing, and career training. Dr. Rao is an effective advocate for women in science and chaired the Committee on Professional Opportunities for Women (CPOW) at the Biophysical Society for nearly a decade. She is a frequent panelist and speaker on gender equity and mentoring at local and international STEM venues. Dr. Rao has held multiple elected leadership roles in the Biophysical Society, including service on the council and as chair of the nominating committee. She has chaired FASEB and Gordon conferences, and served on numerous journal editorial boards and grant review panels at the NIH, DOD, and HHMI.

Suman Rao PN, MD, DM

Dr. Rao is Professor and Head of the Department of Neonatology at St. John's Medical College Hospital in Bengaluru (Bangalore), South India. She is also a consultant in the Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child, Adolescent, and Aging at the WHO. Dr. Rao has worked for over 20 years to improve outcomes of small and sick newborns and has done pioneering research in Kangaroo mother care (KMC) and developmentally supportive care in India. Dr. Rao is a national trainer for neonatal resuscitation and has led the initiatives to mentor Special Newborn Care Units and reduce neonatal mortality. Dr. Rao is keen on low-cost innovations and has helped to develop low cost remote monitoring of newborns, therapeutic hypothermia devices and CPAP devices. She has been part of WHO projects on immediate KMC, ACTION, and Scale up KMC implementation research. She teaches medical and nursing students and supports their budding research interests.

Fabian Rivera-Chávez, PhD

Dr. Rivera-Chávez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and in the Department of Molecular Biology at UC San Diego.

Dr. Rivera-Chávez completed his B.S in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received his PhD in Microbiology from UC Davis under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Bäumler. He went on to pursue postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Prof. John Mekalanos.

The Rivera-Chávez laboratory uses neonatal animal models of disease to understand how bacterial toxins modulate gut metabolism to promote the growth of enteric bacterial pathogens during infection. Dr. Rivera-Chávez's research may shed light into the development of novel and cost-effective therapeutics for treating and preventing infectious diseases.

Nigel Rollins, MD

Dr. Rollins joined the WHO Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing in July 2008. He trained as a paediatrician in Belfast, Northern Ireland and his work focuses on interventions to improve child survival, growth and development. This includes implementation research related to the coverage and quality of infant feeding practices, improving linear growth of children and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. He led the Lancet Breastfeeding series in 2016 and 2023.

Prior to joining WHO, Dr. Rollins was Professor and head of the Centre for Maternal and Child Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, South Africa, where he lived and worked for 14 years.

Patrick M Shih, PhD

Dr. Shih is an Assistant Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley and Investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute. He also serves as the Director of Plant Biosystems and Deputy VP of the Feedstocks Division at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, which is part of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He has a BS in Microbiology and a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in Plant Biology from the University of California, Berkeley and did his postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Stanford University. His lab focuses on utilizing synthetic biology as a tool to engineer plant metabolism, with the ultimate goal of translating our findings into biotechnological applications in agriculture, human health, sustainability, and bioenergy

Shirley M. Tsunoda, PharmD, FCCP

Dr. Tsunoda is a Professor and Associate Dean for Pharmacy Education at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego.

Dr. Tsunoda’s research focuses on using metabolomics to investigate factors influencing the variability of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics. Her group is interested in the intersection of drugs and the gut microbiome – pharmacomicrobiomics. She is one of the Principal Investigators of the UCSD Center of Excellence in Therapeutics for MPRINT (Maternal and Pediatric Precision in Therapeutics) where she is investigating the impact of antibiotic exposure through breastfeeding on the infant microbiome, metabolome, and development. Previous work has included investigating the impact of altering the gut microbiome with antibiotics on drug metabolizing activity and using probe compounds such as midazolam and cyclosporine to predict activity of CYP3A4, the major drug metabolizing enzyme in the intestine and liver, as well as clinical pharmacology investigations with immunosuppressive agents. Her group is also investigating the use of noninvasive techniques to monitor drugs and other chemicals in pregnancy, infancy, and healthcare workers.

Erin Walsh, MA, CCC-SLP, IBCLC, BCS-S

Walsh is a specialized speech-language pathologist and lactation consultant in the Department of Otolaryngology. She manages complex feeding and swallowing disorders across the lifespan. Her research interests include standardizing infant oral-motor diagnostics to disambiguate breastfeeding difficulties and provide timely interventions that preserve milk production and prevent infant malnutrition. Walsh collaborated with Professor James Friend to develop a smart pacifier with machine learning features in hopes of replacing traditional finger-based suckling assessments performed by primary care and breastfeeding medicine clinicians.

Janos Zempleni, PhD

Dr. Zempleni is the Willa Cather of Molecular Nutrition in the Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has pioneered a novel line of discovery by demonstrating that extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their cargo in milk are bioactive. Dr. Zempleni studies the importance of milk EVs in human nutrition and he has engineered milk EVs that deliver any therapeutic cargo to any pathological tissue with unparalleled specificity. He has secured close to $60 million in external funding from NIH, NSF, various foundations, and industry since starting his independent career in 2001, which he leveraged to mentor more than 100 visiting scientists, junior faculty, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students. Dr. Zempleni has published more than 170 peer-reviewed papers and delivered more than 350 presentations in the U.S. and abroad. He is the founding director of an NIH-funded obesity prevention center. Dr. Zempleni is among the top 2% of the most cited researchers worldwide. Dr. Zempleni’s peers recognized his contributions to the field of milk EVs by electing him a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and bestowing five national research awards from the American Society for Nutrition and NIH.