Rodney Dietert, PhD

Cornell University Professor Emeritus
Keynote Speaker

Keynote Address

“A Big Picture View of Our Tiny Microbes”
Chronic diseases, also called noncommunicable disease, are the number one killer in the world. Yet, standard medical practices to date have delivered few cures and, instead, produce an ever-increasing list of chronic diseases and prescription drugs as most of us age. That is because we have been looking in the wrong place to prevent and treat human disease. This presentation will illustrate why and how we must flip the way we protect our health and correctly give attention to our body’s majority, our microbes (called the microbiome). Tools for managing our microbes exist, and these tools empower us in our pursuit of better health.
In this talk you will learn:

Why our microbiome determines how we react to the world outside our body and how our body’s development and function reflects the nature of our co-partners, the microbiome

Why paying attention to our own microbiome first and foremost both empowers us and helps our health providers be more effective in managing lifelong health.

Why seeding, feeding, and protecting a healthier human microbiome is the foundation of a healthier life course.

Practical things that we can do now to flip the storyline from watching our bodies accumulate more diseases with aging to managing and sustaining better health.

bio

Rodney Dietert, PhD is a Cornell University Professor Emeritus, Health Scientist, and the Author of the Human Super-Organism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life.

He received his Ph.D. in immunogenetics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. Rodney has more than 300 publications, including 200 papers and book chapters, with most concerning environmental risk factors, developmental immunotoxicity, and programming of later-life, non-communicable diseases.

His research and public health interests concern risk reduction for noncommunicable diseases (also known as chronic diseases).

The initiatives include:

1) microbiome-based strategies for self-completion of the infant and microbiome management for improved later-life health,

2) identification of effective microbiome-based strategies for NCD treatment,

3) determination of immunological risk in early life from environmental chemicals, foods, and drugs,

4) prevention of NCD comorbidities, and

5) integrated systems biology approaches to reduce the risk of noncommunicable diseases.