Dr. Rey is originally from Cordoba, Argentina where he studied Clinical Chemistry at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba. He completed a Ph.D. in Microbiology at the University of Iowa and a postdoctoral training at Washington University-Saint Louis where he contributed to seminal papers on the role of the gut microbiome on health. He started his independent research program in Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. A major focus of his group is to understand how variations in the gut microbiome composition modulate the effects of diet and the host’s susceptibility to cardiometabolic and cognitive diseases. To address these issues his team uses a combination of hypothesis-generating, sequencing-centered analyses of microbiomes from humans and mice, followed by proof-of-principle/proof-of-mechanism studies in gnotobiotic mouse models of disease and classical bacteriology experiments. The contributions from his team are helping move the field from associations to causal relationships and shedding light into the mechanisms by which gut microbes modulate health.