Yvonne Nyavor, Ph.D., principal scientist for microbiome, Boston Analytical

Gut health was the focus of Yvonne Nyavor’s work long before it became a common phrase in popular culture.

As the principal scientist for microbiome at Boston Analytical, Nyavor studies how the gut microbiome (the collection of microorganisms that inhabit the gut) impacts human health. “We have this collection of microbes training our immune system to recognize when something that is strange, or pathogenic, shows up,” explains Nyavor. “That typically is how we are able to fight infectious diseases.” 

She adds that it’s been “kind of fun” to see more people beginning to catch on to how crucial microbiomes and gut health really are to an individual’s general health in recent years.

Nyavor has been interested in health since she was young. Raised by an English teacher mother and a biology teacher father as a child growing up in Ghana, Nyavor read all of her father’s biology textbooks and was drawn to viruses in particular.

“I found viruses fascinating for their ability to get into a cell … and turn it into their own little factories to make more viruses,” she says. The “super resilient” nature of viruses is what attracted her to study them.

While 2010—2020 could be considered “the decade of the gut,” Nyavor says, she predicts that microbiome research will become even more important in the future and could eventually lead to more personalized medicine. It’s already been shown that the microbiome living in a person’s body is unique to each individual and can affect how that individual responds to medication and food. 

Nyavor believes that in the future, the gut will be the prediction point to determine whether a person can develop certain diseases and more.