10th Annual Metabolic Mastery Conference: Navigating Clinical Advances in the Microbiome – Mitochondria-Brain Connection

Speakers

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  Jeff Bland, PhD Functional Medicine Founder and Pioneer
  

  Jeff Bland, PhD

  Functional Medicine Founder and Pioneer

  Dr. Jeffrey Bland is a personable and highly respected thought leader who has spent more than four decades focused on the improvement of human health.
  
  He is known worldwide as the founder of the Functional Medicine movement, which represents his vision for a care model that is grounded in systems biology and informed by research that he has a unique ability to synthesize. His pioneering work has created the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute (PLMI), as well as the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM), the global leader in Functional Medicine education. Since 1991, hundreds of thousands of healthcare practitioners have participated in PLMI and IFM programs, and this collective knowledge has positively impacted the lives of patients all over the world.

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  Rob Knight Principal Investigator
  

  Rob Knight

  Principal Investigator

  Rob Knight is the founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and Professor of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering, and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego. He is the Wolfe Family Endowed Chair in Microbiome Research at Rady Children’s. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Microbiology. He was honored with the 2019 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for his microbiome research and received the 2017 Massry Prize, often considered a predictor of the Nobel. He is the author of “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes” (Simon & Schuster, 2015), coauthor of “Dirt is Good: The Advantage of Germs for Your Child’s Developing Immune System (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), and written over 900 scientific articles. He spoke at TED in 2014 which is viewed over 2 million times. His lab has produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline (cited over 35,000 times, including QIIME 2) and UniFrac (cited over 12,000 times including its web interface). He is co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project, the American Gut Project, and the company Biota, Inc., which uses DNA from microbes in the subsurface to guide oilfield decisions. His work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease, has enhanced our understanding of microbes in environments ranging from the oceans to the tundra, and made high-throughput sequencing techniques accessible to thousands of researchers around the world. Dr. Knight can be followed on Twitter (@knightlabnews) or on his web site http://knightlab.ucsd.edu/.

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  Ashley Koff, RD Chief Nutrition Officer
  

  Ashley Koff, RD

  Chief Nutrition Officer

  Ashley Koff RD is a nationally recognized dietitian with a career that’s spanned a variety of different areas of dietetics and business. A 25+ year private practitioner, Koff’s focus has been to help people identify and make their better nutrition choices more often practicing what she now calls “truly personalized nutrition,” while coining terms such as “Qualitarian” “INFObesity” and the mantra “Better Not Perfect”. She’s written two books, authored chapters for several others, developed app-based personalized nutrition programs and The BNP Toolkit to help practitioners more easily evaluate and optimize their patient’s total nutrition. You may have seen her as a national media expert with regular segments on shows like Good Morning America, Today Show, The Doctors and The Dr Oz Show. Ditching a career where she helped create not better options (Smart Start, Raisin Bran Crunch), Koff helped launch ingredients such as hemp seeds (Manitoba Harvest), bifidobacteria infantis (Align), coconut water (ONE), acai (Sambazon), gummy / chew supplements (SmartyPants), refrigerated protein bars (Perfect Bar) and glucoraphanin (TrueBroc). Selected as the Global Wellness Ambassador for Westin Hotels, inStyle magazine Hollywood’s Nutritionist, among CNN’s Top 100 Health Makers and as an advisor for The Partnership for a Healthier America and Tufts University Nutrition Entrepreneurship program. Today she helms a team at The Better Nutrition Program a company she founded in 2019 and is a fractitional Chief Nutrition Officer for entities like Vitaboom.

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  Kristine Burke, MD Founder, Chief Executive, and Medical Director - True Health Center for Precision Medicine, Northern California
  

  Kristine Burke, MD

  Founder, Chief Executive, and Medical Director - True Health Center for Precision Medicine, Northern California

  Kristine Burke, MD is a triple board-certified Precision Medicine Physician, Entrepreneur, Author, Educator, and Researcher. She is an expert in the reversal and prevention of chronic diseases such as dementia, diabetes, heart attacks and strokes with a special focus on mold-related illness and its connection to many health conditions. Stemming from her clinical outcomes excellence and research into promoting brain health and reversing the cognitive decline of early dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease, she co-founded TruNeura with its unique AI-supported patient coaching interface and provider-focused clinical decision support software advancing the mission to scale the prevention and reversal of cognitive decline worldwide. To further this mission, she teaches Precision and Functional Medicine to advance the knowledge of other physicians and practitioners in her role as Asst Clinical Professor of Preventive Medicine at Loma Linda University School of Medicine and as an educator and frequent speaker for a variety of national and international organizations.

  She is the Founder, Chief Executive, and Medical Director of True Health Center for Precision Medicine in Northern California – a multi-disciplinary practice that delivers personalized primary care with a proprietary data-driven wellness plan that successfully prevented any heart attacks from occurring among their member patients for over a decade. Always striving to be at the forefront of innovation, her Center was the first commercial site in the US to offer QT Imaging’s Breast Acoustic CT™ Scan that provides remarkable breast imaging quality comfortably, without radiation or compression, offering women a new opportunity to augment their options for breast cancer screening. The Center is proud to provide an array of specialized consultation services to define and address the root causes of disease so that every day they can reverse chronic illness to help people reclaim their health, and their hope.

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  Edward Walker, PhD Cutting-Edge Scientist in Plant-Based Appetite Control Research
  

  Edward Walker, PhD

  Cutting-Edge Scientist in Plant-Based Appetite Control Research

  Dr Edward Walker is a scientist and lecturer, who believes that a developing a healthy relationship with food is key for long-term wellness. He works at The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research, undertaking commercially focused research of nutraceutical products for human health applications, with a focus on clinical validation of lab-based results. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Auckland on the topic of nutraceuticals and functionals foods.

  Over the last 13 years Edward’s primary research focus has been the investigation of plant-based, appetite suppressants that may reduce hunger and support healthy food choices. This work led to the development of a novel NZ hops-based appetite suppressant, that shares an overlapping mode of action with a new class of effective GLP-1 based anti-obesity drugs.

  He is passionate about plant-based nutraceuticals and believes that with the appropriate scientific research, they have the potential to improve health and even prevent or delay the development of chronic disease.

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  Chris Turnpaugh, DC Functional Medicine Expert in Clinical Neurology and Autoimmunity
  

  Chris Turnpaugh, DC

  Functional Medicine Expert in Clinical Neurology and Autoimmunity
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  Lisa Portera, DC, IFMCP Clinical Expert in Bioenergetics and Musculoskeletal Health
  

  Lisa Portera, DC, IFMCP

  Clinical Expert in Bioenergetics and Musculoskeletal Health
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  Elroy Vojdani, MD Functional and Predictive Immune Testing Authority
  

  Elroy Vojdani, MD

  Functional and Predictive Immune Testing Authority

  Dr. Elroy Vojdani is the founder of Regenera Medical, a boutique Functional Medicine practice in Los Angeles, California.

  Upon graduating medical school from the University of Southern California and completing his residency at USC Keck School of Medicine, Dr. V began his career as an Interventional Radiologist, diagnosing and treating complex, late-stage cancers and other extremely debilitating diseases. While this experience gave him unique insights into hospital based medicine, his desire to stop disease before it reached the point of becoming a chronic illness remained at the core of his desire to practice medicine. Today, he continues in his father’s footsteps – pioneering to find answers to medical conditions that go undiagnosed and untreated.

  Dr. Vojdani has co-authored over 20 articles in the Scientific literature and continues an integral role in research related to Autoimmune, Neurodegenerative, and Autoinflammatory conditions.  He is also the co-Author a medical textbook entitled “Food Associated Autoimmunity”.

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  Austin Perlmutter, MD Author and Board-Certified Internal Medicine Physician
  

  Austin Perlmutter, MD

  Author and Board-Certified Internal Medicine Physician

  Dr Austin Perlmutter is a board-certified internal medicine physician, New York Times bestselling author, published researcher and international educator. His mission is to help people improve their health by targeting the biological basis of “stuckness” in our brains and bodies. His writing, presentations, podcasts, and online educational programs explore how environmental factors influence our cognitive and mental state and have reached millions. Dr. Perlmutter currently serves as the managing director at Big Bold Health, a food-as-medicine company focused on helping people rejuvenate health through better immune function, where he is running a first-of-its kind study exploring the effects of plant nutrients on human aging through epigenetics.

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  Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD Molecular Immunology Expert
  

  Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD

  Molecular Immunology Expert

  Tom earned his Ph.D. in 1996 from the Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), where he studied molecular biology/immunology. After his graduate studies, he joined Ortho Molecular Products- a premier physician channel dietary supplement manufacturer- establishing the roles of both science and regulatory affairs. Since that time, he has become an expert in the mechanisms, actions and therapeutic uses of nutritional and non-pharmacological agents, as well as the complex regulatory and quality issues related to dietary supplement manufacturing and marketing. This expertise allowed him to begin writing and teaching, and in 2014 he began writing a series of teaching manuals (Road maps) that outline and evaluate the evidence for the principles and protocols that are fundamental to the functional and integrative medical community. These textbooks explore the root cause pathophysiology of complex chronic diseases, along with the evidence and mechanisms for non-pharmacological therapeutic solutions. Tom teaches at the University of Wisconsin- Madison School of Pharmacy, where he holds an appointment as an Adjunct Associate Professor, and lectures widely to a range of healthcare professionals interested in leveraging lifestyle and natural agents as first-line therapies. Today, Tom serves as a consultant to organizations within the natural products, integrative and functional medicine space where he endeavors to make a real difference in the health and lives of millions. He lives (and works) off the beaten path outside of Stevens Point, Wisconsin with his family; where he has too many hobbies to list here.

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  Jon D. Kaiser, M.D. Functional Medicine, Practitioner Clinical Faculty University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco
  

  Jon D. Kaiser, M.D.

  Functional Medicine, Practitioner Clinical Faculty University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco

  Jon D. Kaiser, M.D. has been treating individuals with serious, chronic medical conditions for over thirty years with a combination of natural and conventional treatments. Many of Dr. Kaiser’s patients suffer from fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, HIV/AIDS and neurodegenerative disorders. The majority of Dr. Kaiser’s patients stabilize, improve, and frequently restored themselves back to excellent health.

  Dr. Kaiser also specializes in mitochondrial biology and has published several research papers on mitochondrial dysfunction’s link to degenerative diseases. He is on the faculty of the University of California Medical School in San Francisco and is the author of several books on healing from chronic medical conditions. Dr. Kaiser currently sees patients nationwide via telemedicine. More information at www.JonKaiser.com.

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  Shilpa P. Saxena, MD Lifestyle Medicine Leader and Group Visit Pioneer
  

  Shilpa P. Saxena, MD

  Lifestyle Medicine Leader and Group Visit Pioneer

  Shilpa P. Saxena, MD is a Board-Certified family physician with an uncompromising dedication to bringing functional integrative medicine to the masses. In 2019, she joined Forum Health, a nationwide network of nearly 100 integrative providers providing services on the same EMR. She sees the extraordinary value proposition of what we do as a community, not only as a practicing clinician herself, but also as Chief Medical Officer creating systems and structures and data that will make this the healthcare of the future.

  In addition to over 20 years of successful insurance-based and concierge medical practices, Dr. Saxena shares her clinical and practice management strategies as an educator at IFM, University of Miami, George Washington University, Cleveland Clinic and more. Her latest personal Mt. Everest is to figure out the social media game as ShilpaMD with the goal of making functional medicine most approachable for more and more.