Dr. Nick Burton investigates how the microbiome can promote health or, when things go wrong, fuel disease. His research explores why some people with genetic risk are protected from disease while others are affected.

He joined Van Andel Institute as an assistant professor in 2021. Prior to establishing his lab, he was a Next Generation Fellow at University of Cambridge’s Centre for Trophoblast Research, where he studied how environmental bacteria affect development, physiology, metabolism and neuronal function in individuals and their offspring.

Dr. Burton earned a B.S. in biology from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked in the labs of Dr. Anna Huttenlocher and Dr. Scott Kennedy. He was awarded a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and went on to earn a Ph.D. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Dr. H. Robert Horvitz. As part of his dissertation work, Dr. Burton worked to develop new paradigms to study the mechanisms by which parental environment regulates offspring physiology.