#298: David Zeevi, PhD – Genes of Gut Microbes & Inter-Individual Variation in Glucose Response

David Zeevi, PhD

David Zeevi is an independent research fellow at Rockefeller University in New York. His current work focuses on developing computational methods for studying microbial ecology in the human gut and in the marine environment, and its contribution to human and environmental health.

Previously he completed his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel under Prof. Eran Segal, studying the human microbiome and its effect on host health and personalized nutrition. He was lead author on two important studies to come from the lab, published in Nature and Cell respectively.

• Investigating the individual post-prandial glucose response (PPGR) based on blood markers, microbiome, CGM data, anthropometrics and more
• PPGR to bread very different among individuals: Cookie vs. Banana; Glucose vs. bread.
• Carbohydrate counting only achieves a modest yet statistically significant correlation with PPGRs
• Meal response predictor: This model predicts PPGRs using the sum of thousands of different decision trees
• 26 person intervention trial: PPGRs in the “bad” diet were significantly higher than in the “good” diet
• Structural variation in the gut microbiome associates with host health
• Segments of varying lengths, potentially containing multiple genes, that are deleted from certain bacteria in some individuals or present in a variable number of copies in others.

• Zeevi et al., 2019 – Structural variation in the gut microbiome associates with host health
• Zeevi et al., 2015 – Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses
• Twitter: @DaveZeevi