Mohamed Donia

Mohamed S. Donia is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where he established his independent laboratory in 2014, initially as an Assistant Professor. He received his B.Sc. in Pharmacy from the Faculty of Pharmacy, Suez Canal University, Egypt, in 2004, and his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the School of Pharmacy, University of Utah, in 2010. During his graduate studies in Eric Schmidt’s laboratory, Donia explored the chemistry and biology of small molecules produced by bacterial symbionts of marine animals, employing chemical, microbiological, and metagenomic techniques to examine their roles in microbe-host and microbe-microbe interactions. He then pursued postdoctoral training in Michael Fischbach’s laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, investigating small molecules from the human microbiome, with a focus on antibiotics produced by human pathogens and commensals that influence the composition and dynamics of vaginal and oral microbiota.

The Donia lab operates at the intersection of microbiology, molecular biology, biochemistry, small molecule chemistry, biosynthesis, metagenomics, and computational biology to study small-molecule-mediated interactions in diverse microbial communities such as the human gut microbiome and marine symbioses. Key research contributions include developing high-throughput approaches to define biochemical transformations by the human gut microbiome on drugs and dietary compounds, identifying microbiome-encoded resistance to the antidiabetic drug acarbose, and creating metagenomic tools like MetaBGC for discovering biosynthetic gene clusters. Notable publications encompass “Personalized Mapping of Drug Metabolism by the Human Gut Microbiome” (Cell, 2020), “The human microbiome encodes resistance to the antidiabetic drug acarbose” (Nature, 2021), “A metagenomic strategy for harnessing the chemical repertoire of the human microbiome” (Science, 2019), “A microbial factory for defensive kahalalides in a tripartite marine symbiosis” (Science, 2019), and “Localized production of defence chemicals by intracellular symbionts of Haliclona sponges” (Nature Microbiology, 2019). Donia has earned prestigious awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2015), Kenneth Rainin Foundation Innovator and Breakthrough Awards (2015–2017), Pew Biomedical Scholar (2017), Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research (2020), and Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science (2020). His findings illuminate microbiome roles in health, disease, and therapeutic responses, advancing microbiome-targeted diagnostics and therapies.

Professional Email: mdonia@princeton.edu