PreMiEr Spring 2025 Seminar Series- Dr. Kieran O’Doherty, University of Guelph

The NSF Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) invites you to another installment of the PreMiEr Spring 2025 Seminar Series on March 27th from Noon to 1pm on Zoom:

Dr. Kieran O’Doherty from the University of Guelph Applied Social Psychology department will be presenting:  Microbiome Stewardship as a Conceptual Foundation for Policies

Human microbiomes, to a large degree, are shaped by the environments in which we live. We rely on microbial exposures from other people, animals, and plants. Our microbiomes are also shaped by the consequences of human activities like pesticide use, air and water pollution, the condition of our soils, and widespread use of antibiotics. In modern industrialized societies, the environment in which we live for much of our life is a built environment. This means that a very large proportion of the features of the environments in which we live are the result of human decisions. In theory, it makes sense to be strategic about such decisions, such that our built environments support human health and mental health, including considerations of their effects on microbiomes. In practice, there are many challenges to realizing ideals of making society level decisions that lead to healthy microbiomes. First, decisions about our collective built environments are distributed across actors and stakeholders, and so it is difficult to pinpoint exact political entry points where policies to ensure healthy microbiomes could be advanced. Second, awareness of the importance of fostering healthy microbiomes through considered crafting of built environments is low. Thus, what is needed is a conceptual foundation that would support the strategic development of built environments that foster healthy microbiomes. The notion of microbiome stewardship offers to be such a foundation. In this presentation, Dr. O’Doherty will introduce the concept of microbiome stewardship and explain a pathway for elaborating the idea, and how it might be useful in guiding policy across diverse domains

This series is open to the public, but non-PreMiEr members must register to receive the Zoom link. You need register only once for the entire series.

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