Speakers
Ami Bhatt
Professor of Medicine and Genetics
Stanford University
Ami Bhatt is a Professor at Stanford University in the Departments of Medicine (Hematology; Blood & Marrow Transplantation) and Genetics. A physician scientist with a strong interest in microbial genomics and metagenomics, she received her MD and PhD from the University of California, San Francisco (Alpha Omega Alpha), followed by residency, chief residency and hematology/oncology fellowship training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Center at Harvard Medical School. She joined the faculty at Stanford University in 2014 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship focused on genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.
Prof. Bhatt’s laboratory develops and applies novel molecular and computational tools to study strain level dynamics of the human microbiome, to understand how microbial genomes change over time and predict the functional output of microbiomes. She is keenly interested to understand how microbes use microproteins to “talk” to one another and to human cells, and to leverage this understanding to improve health and treat diseases. Her work is actively being translated from bench to bedside; for example, enzymes that her lab mined from microbes are now being developed these as human genome editing/engineering tools in a start-up company that she co-founded.
She has received multiple awards including the Chen Award of Excellence from the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO), the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Paul Allen Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation Fellowship; she is also an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the 2024 American Society of Hematology William Dameshek Prize winner. She has disseminated her distinguished research globally, delivering more than 175 invited presentations. A committed mentor, she has served as the primary research advisor to a diverse cohort of over 60 undergraduate, medical, PhD, and post-doctoral scholars.
Dr. Bhatt is also leading efforts to ensure equity and global access in research and medicine. She carries out research with the H3Africa Genomics Consortium, volunteers for the nonprofit she co-founded in 2012, Global Oncology, and serves as the Director for Global Oncology for Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health. She is working to improve collaboration and exchange between scholars at Stanford and those in South Asia, Africa, and beyond. She continues to practice medicine, caring for patients with hematological disorders. Outside of work, she enjoys strumming on the guitar and making her pour over coffee with scientific precision.
