Emma Allen-Vercoe - Edit 1

- My name is Emma Allen-Vercoe, I am in molecular and cell biology here at the University of Guelph, and I'm a microbiologist and I specifically work on the human gut. My research is really about the microbes that live inside the human gut and that's actually a huge area and it's a very exciting new rich area of research. And we know very, very little about it and the reason its suddenly become very important is because we're now realizing that the microbes living in the gut controls so many aspects of health. What motivates me to do this research is really just because I'm a microbial ecologist now, I've really kind of changed fields from doing microbial pathogenesis, And I spent most of my formative years in microbiology and during that time I was thinking, "Well, what about the microbes in our pathogens?" Nobody works on those. If someone tells me not to do something, that makes me want to do it even more and this certainly was the case in my career as well. And so I decided I was gonna get, "These are unculturable, okay, I'm going to show you how to culture them," and that's in fact what my lab is known for now. Getting this award is wonderful to have because it's really is recognizing and appreciating that this field isn't as crazy as it first might have seemed, you know, those sad years ago when I first started out in this profession, I think my mentors thought I was crazy. And so it's really nice to be recognized and sort of validated that what I did was actually... is a good field to get into, it's going somewhere, the research is important and so... and I think that that's really what drives me most of all.