Dr. Jane Foster, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, at the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. In the past 20 years, Dr. Foster has developed an internationally recognized translational research program that uses a 'bench to bedside' and back again approach to studying microbiota - brain and immune - brain systems. As one of the early proponents of the role of gut - brain axis in mental health, her lab produced important data demonstrating a role for the microbiome in brain development and behavior in animal studies and recently has extended this work to study the complex neurobiological underpinnings of microbiota - brain and neuroimmune systems in psychiatric illness in clinical populations. Her multidisciplinary expertise includes behavioral neuroscience, molecular biology, immunology, neuroimaging, microbiome, and bioinformatics in both preclinical and clinical research domains. Dr. Foster's research program has developed high-quality analytical pipelines for biological data and novel analytical tools for integrating data across modalities.