Professor Sharon Donovan is the Melissa M. Noel Endowed Chair in Nutrition and Health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in Nutrition at the University of California at Davis and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Pediatric Endocrinology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Research in her laboratory focuses on the coordinated development of the gut microbiome, immune system, and neurocognition in early life. Currently, she studies how human milk oligosaccharides and proteins influence microbiome composition and immune function in neonates. Her laboratory has published > 250 manuscripts and book chapters and has garnered nearly $40M in grant support. She has served as president of two societies: the American Society for Nutrition from 2011-2012 and the International Society for Research on Human Milk and Lactation from 2018-2020. She served on the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and was recently named Chair of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Medicine.