Dr. Devkota is Director of Microbiome Research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCLA. She has been studying the effect of diet on the gut microbiome and inflammatory diseases for the past 12 years. investigating dietary drivers of gut microbiome structure and function in inflammatory bowel diseases and metabolic diseases. More recently her lab has developed interest in studying the microbial ecology of gut bacterial translocation in the human body. Particular interest lies in the study of commensal microbes that take advantage of impaired host defenses to turn pathogenic. She completed her doctoral and post-doctoral training at The University of Chicago and Joslin Diabetes Center/Harvard Medical School respectively, and is a former Branco Weiss Fellow.