Dr. Leonor García Bayona

Biography

Leonor García-Bayona is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. She grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, and completed her undergraduate studies in Chemical Engineering and Microbiology at the University of the Andes. She earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied genetics and cell physiology under the supervision of Dr. Michael Laub, focusing on a new interbacterial antagonism system. Following her doctoral studies, she became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Laurie Comstock at Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, furthering her expertise in intestinal anaerobe microbiology and advanced microscopy coupled with computational analyses of the microbiome. Her lab investigates the role of mobile genes in community interactions within the human intestinal microbiota and assesses how this knowledge can be harnessed for targeted therapeutic interventions. García-Bayona's research is particularly concerned with the rapid evolution of the human microbiome and the implications of gene transfer in human health, aiming to bridge the gap between systemic observational studies and mechanistic understanding of bacterial genetics and physiology.

Research Interests