Dr. Jenessa Winston is an Associate Professor at the Ohio State University. She received a Bachelor of Science in Integrated Biology from University of Florida in 2007. She then received her veterinary degree from North Carolina State University in 2011. She went on to complete a rotating small animal internship and residency in small animal internal medicine at NC State achieving board certification, as a diplomate in the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, in 2015.  As a Clinical Investigator and NIH T32 fellow at NC State, Dr. Winston completed a PhD in Comparative Biomedical Sciences with an Infectious Disease concentration in 2019.

As a clinician scientist, Dr. Winston’s primary research areas of interest include microbe-host interactions during health and disease. She has a special interest in microbially derived bile acids and rational manipulation of microbial ecosystems including interventions such as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). Dr. Winston is chair of the international Companion Animal FMT Consortium, which has developed clinical guidelines for FMT. Since starting at the OSU, Dr. Winston has launched the Companion Animal Fecal Bank, which serves as a unique research platform to accelerate our study and translation of microbial community sciences into safe and effective clinical applications.

Recently, Dr. Winston has been recognized as an OSU Provost Midcareer Scholar for her translational research. Her laboratory is currently conducting two FMT clinical trials for feline chronic kidney disease and canine parvovirus enteritis. In addition to Dr. Winston’s veterinary microbiome research, she is also a recipient of an NIH NIAID K08 award focused on defining the role of the gut microbiota and the microbially derived secondary bile acids in conferring susceptibility and contributing to the severity of C. difficile infection during intestinal inflammation caused by inflammatory bowel disease.