About the speaker

Ömer Yılmaz is an Assistant Professor of Biology at MIT and a gastrointestinal pathologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School, where he performed his thesis work under the guidance of Professor Sean Morrison. He has also spent two years as a visiting postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Professor David M. Sabatini, a member of the Whitehead and Koch Institutes.
The goal of the Yilmaz laboratory is to understand how adult stem cells and their microenvironment adapt to diverse diets in the context of tissue regeneration, aging, and cancer initiation. Towards this end, they are studying the effects of dietary interventions such as calorie restriction and high fat diet-induced obesity on intestinal stem cell (ISC) function in the mammalian intestine.