Bio
Ami Bhatt is a Professor at Stanford University in the Departments of Medicine (Hematology; Blood & Marrow Transplantation) and Genetics, where her laboratory studies the hidden layer of the microbial genome. This is the dynamic, largely invisible layer of biology that determines how microbes adapt and what they actually do.
Conventional genomics reads a genome as a fixed sequence. Prof. Bhatt's work has shown that much of what makes microbes consequential lies elsewhere: in DNA that jumps, inverts, and rewrites itself on clinically relevant timescales; in chemical marks and small RNAs that reshape how genomes are read; and in genes so small that standard annotation tools were built to skip them. Her laboratory develops the molecular and computational tools to see this layer, and studies it where the stakes are highest — in patients undergoing transplantation, fighting infection, or receiving cancer therapy, whose microbial communities are adapting in real time. This work has revealed thousands of previously unrecognized microbial microproteins, including novel antimicrobials and immune-modulating molecules, and has demonstrated that microbial evolution can occur within the course of a single hospitalization. These discoveries have translated directly to medicine: enzymes her lab mined from microbial genomes are now being developed as human genome-engineering tools by a company she co-founded (Stylus Medicine), and her group's findings are informing new approaches to diagnosis and therapy.
She received her MD & PhD from the University of California, San Francisco (Alpha Omega Alpha), followed by residency, chief residency, and fellowship training at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, and postdoctoral training in genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She joined the Stanford faculty in 2014.
Prof. Bhatt's honors include the Chen Award of Excellence from the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO), the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Paul Allen Foundation, and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship. She is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the 2024 recipient of the American Society of Hematology's William Dameshek Prize. She has delivered more than 200 invited presentations worldwide and has served as primary research advisor to over 60 undergraduate, medical, doctoral, and postdoctoral scholars.
Dr. Bhatt also works to ensure that global communities benefit from advances in research and medicine. She conducts research with the H3Africa Genomics Consortium, volunteers for Global Oncology, the nonprofit she co-founded in 2012, and served as Director for Global Oncology at Stanford's Center for Innovation in Global Health (2014–2026). She continues to practice clinical medicine, caring for patients with hematological disorders. Outside of work, she is diligently iterating on her vegan ramen recipe.
