Dr. Ami Bhatt Receives the 2024 William Dameshek Prize
“I love science, and I love medicine. And when you're honored in this way by a society that means a lot to you both personally and professionally, it's very exciting — and very humbling. This award celebrates the investment of a lot of mentors in my training and education, as well as the hard work of all of my trainees.”
Named for the late William Dameshek, MD, a past president of ASH and the original editor of Blood, the Dameshek prize recognizes an early- or mid-career hematologist who has made an outstanding contribution to the field before age 50.
Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University, is being recognized for pioneering the development and application of genomic approaches to studying the microbiome — work that has improved outcomes for many human diseases. She has applied microbiomics in the clinical setting to study the impact of gut decontamination on transplant outcomes and has co-led efforts to study the microbiome in the context of evolving graft-versus-host disease prophylaxis strategies.
Dr. Bhatt also successfully linked bloodstream infections and outcomes in transplant patients to characteristics within the gut microbiome and uncovered a link between prolonged gastrointestinal SARS-CoV-2 viral shedding and gastrointestinal symptoms, among other major findings. Her unique and highly collaborative work has broad implications across biomedicine, with her landmark research resulting in a broad expansion of knowledge on microbial enzymes that can be developed for gene therapy.
Dr. Bhatt, who received both her MD and a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California, San Francisco, felt a strong pull toward hematology during her very first rotation as an intern on the bone marrow transplant service at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
“Hematologic disorders are so varied and fascinating,” she said. “I was instantly intrigued by the basic science of the diseases and the therapies, as well as the experiences of the patients who were receiving these treatments.”
In her current work at Stanford, Dr. Bhatt remains particularly interested in how the microbes that live in and on us affect our health. And she looks forward to the future of the field with enthusiasm and optimism.
“Our lab is focused on developing new, improved tools to intricately measure aspects of the microbiome, which may enable us to take phenomenological observations and turn them into mechanistic understandings of how microbes are interacting with one another, and with us,” she said. “We're starting to have a much better understanding of how specific microbial antigens are interacting with different components of our immune system. We've now also been able to develop ways to start to manipulate the host hematopoietic system. I feel like we're on the precipice of great things, as a field and hopefully also as a lab.”
Dr. Bhatt was a fellow in hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and completed post-doctoral studies at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She serves as director of global oncology for Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health, as well as co-founder and co-president of the nonprofit organization Global Oncology.
Dr. Bhatt is also the director of fellowship research at Stanford’s Department of Medicine, co-chair of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Microbiome symposium, and a member of the Damon Runyon Quantitative Biology Fellowship Award Committee. Among her many honors, she was most recently awarded the American Society of Microbiology’s Microbiome Data Prize.
Outside of work, Dr. Bhatt enjoys cooking, traveling, and exploring nature and all its creatures.
Fun Fact: “Even though I'm solidly in middle age, I still like to go clubbing in places like Berlin.”
