Dipali Sharma, Ph.D., M.S.

The human body is teeming with internal fauna. There are an estimated 10–100 trillion additional cells in this mass of microbes — roughly equal to the number of human cells in our bodies — and they are found everywhere, including the breast. Sharma will focus on one such microbe, Bacteroides fragilis, the presence of which in the breast, gut and mammary tissue is linked to a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer.