Steven Ricke and Katie Lynn Summers to appear at Symposium on Gut Health in St. Louis

Drs. Steven C. Ricke and Katie Lynn Summers will be the invited speakers at the 2019 edition of the Symposium on Gut Health in Production of Food Animals.

The event will be held November 4-6 in St. Louis, Missouri. The venue will be the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark.

Dr. Steven C. Ricke received his B.S. and M.S. from the Univ. of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL. and Ph.D. from the Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. Dr. Ricke was a USDA-ARS postdoctorate in the Microbiology Department at North Carolina State Univ then joined Texas A&M Univ. as a professor in the Poultry Science Dept. In 2005, he became the first holder of the new Donald “Buddy” Wray Endowed Chair in Food Safety and Director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Arkansas (UA) and is a faculty member of the Dept. of Food Science and Cellular and Molecular Graduate program.

He received the Poultry Sci. Assoc. (PSA) Research Award in 1999, American Egg Board award in 2006 and was honored as a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Faculty Fellow in 2002, and the Division of Agriculture - UA John White Outstanding Research Award in 2012. He served as co-founder and former President of the Arkansas Association of Food Protection (AAFP) and named as an AAFP in 2015 and a PSA Fellow in 2017.

He was selected as an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer from 2015 to 2017. Dr. Ricke’s Salmonella research projects have emphasized studies on the growth, survival and pathogenesis of the organism in the poultry GIT and its interaction with the GIT microbiota. He is also exploring the interaction between different prebiotics, the poultry GIT microbiota and host responses.

Dr. Katie Summers is a Research Microbiologist at the USDA in Beltsville, MD in the Animal Biosciences and Biotechnology Laboratory. She earned her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Michigan where her dissertation investigated the critical role of the gut microbiome in shaping allergies and asthma. She then completed postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University (Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology) and the University of Michigan Medical School (Infectious Disease).

Dr. Summers then held visiting positions at the University of Kansas (Molecular Biosciences) and Miami of Ohio (Microbiology). Summers’ research is focused on understanding the role of the microbiome and metabolome in piglet growth during the weaning transition. She has conducted research on identifying indigenous members of the piglet gut microbiome, with an emphasis on the mycobiome, that are associated with performance outcomes and overall growth.

She has also investigated proteomic indicators of performance and ex vivo models of intestinal health. She currently serves as a mentor to underrepresented populations in high school and college that are interested in STEM careers.