Assistant Professor
University of Maine
Dr. Sue Ishaq (pronounced eye-shack) is an Assistant Professor of Animal and Veterinary Science at the University of Maine, in the School of Food and Agriculture. She received her doctorate in Animal, Nutrition and Food Science from the University of Vermont in 2015 where her graduate study focused on the rumen microbiology of the moose. She held post-doctoral positions at Montana State University, and a research faculty position at the University of Oregon. Over the years, her research has gone from wild animal gut microbiomes, to soils, to buildings, and back to gut microbiomes. Since 2019, her lab in Maine focuses on host-associated microbial communities in animals and humans, and in particular, how host and microbes interact in the gut, during early life development, or in food animals. She and collaborators have recently been awarded funding from the NIH and Allen Foundation to support this work. In addition to her research on gut microbes, Dr. Ishaq is the founder of the Microbes and Social Equity working group, which currently has 230 members from over 22 countries. This group formed to examine, publicize and promote a research program on the reciprocal impact of social inequality and microbiomes, both human and environmental. Sue organizes an annual speaker series, annual virtual symposium which is coming up in June, and had been the lead editor on a microbes and social equity special collection with the mSystems journal.