Congratulations to Anne Marie Singh, MD, Principal Investigator, who has been awarded a grant of $35,000 from the UW Food Research Institute for her project entitled, “Microbiome Influences on Pediatric Food Allergy.” As the incidence of food allergy and number of different foods triggering food allergy responses increases, it is even more important to understand the cellular mechanisms that initiate allergic responses to foods and how environmental exposures influence the development of food allergy. This project will provide key preliminary data on specific bacterial or bacterial communities (such as Staphylococcus aureus) that may influence immune function, in order to determine the mechanisms by which these specific bacterial exposures influence food allergy. These findings will be the basis of future work to investigate how the bacterial exposures affect T cell mechanisms in oral tolerance.