Christoph A. Thaiss
2024 National Award Finalist — Faculty
Current Position:
Assistant Professor
Institution:
University of Pennsylvania
Discipline:
Neuroscience & Immunology
Recognized for:
Significant advances in decoding the mechanisms by which the communication between environment, body, and brain mediates the impact of lifestyle factors on common human diseases.
Areas of Research Interest and Expertise:
Neuroscience, Immunology, Microbiology, Metabolism, Cancer Biology
Previous Positions:
PhD, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel (Advisor: Eran Elinav)
MSc, Yale University and ETH Zurich, Switzerland (Advisors: Richard Flavell, Wolf-Dietrich Hardt)
BSc, University of Bonn, Germany (Advisor: Christian Kurts)
Research Summary:
Identifying commonalities in the pathogenesis mechanisms of major human diseases, including neurodegeneration, cardiometabolic diseases, chronic inflammatory diseases, and cancer, is an urgent challenge. The team of Christoph Thaiss, PhD, tackles this issue by employing systems biology tools in animal and human studies to decipher the interplay between environment, body, and brain over the lifespan. Dr. Thaiss’s research has uncovered several mechanisms of how dysfunctional gut-brain communication contributes to common human diseases and has resulted in actionable insights that are now being tested in clinical trials.
“My research group strives to uncover the most fundamental biological principles underlying the tripartite communication between the environment, the body, and the brain. This honor is a great source of inspiration for our future work.”
Key Publications:
- A.C. Wong et al., C.A. Thaiss*. Serotonin reduction in post-acute sequelae of viral infection. Cell, 2023.
- K.M. Schneider et al., C.A. Thaiss*. The enteric nervous system relays psychological stress to intestinal inflammation. Cell, 2023.
- L. Dohnalová et al., C.A. Thaiss. A microbiome-dependent gut-brain pathway regulates motivation for exercise. Nature, 2022
- O. Dmitrieva-Posocco et al., C.A. Thaiss*. β-Hydroxybutyrate suppresses colorectal cancer. Nature, 2022.
Other Honors:
2024 Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award, Burroughs Wellcome Fund
2023 Michael S. Brown New Investigator Research Award, University of Pennsylvania
2023 Microbiome Prize Finalist, Science & Noster
2021 Scialog Fellow for Mitigating Zoonic Threats, Research Corporation for Science Advancement
2020 Pew Biomedical Scholar, Pew Charitable Trusts
2019 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, National Institutes of Health
2018 Grand Prize for a Young Scientist, Science & SciLifeLab
2018 Early Career Professor Award, Agilent
2018 – present, Highly Cited Scholar (top 1% in biomedical sciences), Clarivate
In the Media:
The New York Times – Scientists offer a new explanation for Long Covid
National Geographic – What causes long COVID? The answer might be in your gut
The Washington Post – Don’t feel like exercising? It could be your microbiome
National Geographic – Why do some love to exercise? It might be their microbiome