Deanna L. Gibson

Dr. Deanna Gibson is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia on the Okanagan Campus. She is a translational scientist who studies how the gut microbiome develops in response to environmental cues, like dietary patterns, and how this drives immunometabolic responses. She has shown dietary lipids and patterns of diet are major predictors of which types of microbes and bacterial metabolites are produced in the mammalian gut. For example, early life is an important time for microbial colonization and she has shown maternal dietary patterns alter the breast milk fungal and bacterial communities which are passed on from mother to offspring. She has found that host behaviors, such as exercise, predict microbiome diversity associated with metabolite production in the human gut; diet, the lived environment as well as food pesticides associated with agricultural practices are also important factors that drive the gut microbiome.

One focus of Dr. Gibson’s research has been how to improve diets for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients, including a clinical trial on the Mediterranean diet pattern in people with Ulcerative Colitis. One of her major areas in her research lab is to figure out how to alter the course of the microbiome through novel therapeutics. One example is by improving the bioavailability of probiotics to improve the disease-associated microbiome that stimulates unbalanced inflammation. To this end, she has bioengineered live biotherapeutic products to treat intestinal inflammatory conditions including IBD and metabolic comorbidities as well as on the gut-brain axis.