Liping Zhao is currently the Eveleigh-Fenton Chair of Applied Microbiology at Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Director of Center for Nutrition, Microbiome, and health of New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health, Rutgers University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He serves on Scientific Advisory Board for the Center for Microbiome Research and Education of the American Gastroenterology Association (AGA). He also directs Rutgers Center for Microbiome Analysis. His team has pioneered the approach of applying metagenomics-metabolomics integrated tools and dietary intervention for systems understanding and predictive manipulation of gut microbiota to improve human metabolic health. Following the logic of Koch’s postulates, Liping has found that endotoxin-producing opportunistic pathogens overgrowing in the obese human gut can induce obesity, fatty liver, and insulin resistance when mono-colonized in germfree mice via the endotoxin-TLR4 pathway as the initiating molecular crosstalk. Their clinical trials published in Science and EBioMedicine showed that high dietary fiber modulation of gut microbiota can significantly alleviate metabolic diseases including a genetic form of obesity in children and type 2 diabetes in adults. His team has pioneered a reference-free, genome-centric and ecology-based strategy for microbiome data mining. The Science magazine featured a story on how he combines traditional Chinese medicine and gut microbiota study to understand and fight obesity.