Nikhil Pai

Background

About Nikhil Pai

American- and Canadian–board-certified pediatric gastroenterologist, hepatologist, and nutrition specialist. I am an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, Attending Physician in the Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Director of the Clinical Trials Division within the CHOP Center for Microbial Medicine, and Principal Investigator of the Pai Lab at the CHOP Research Institute and McMaster University.My clinical practice focuses on pediatric nutrition support, metabolic dysfunction–associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), intestinal rehabilitation and short bowel syndrome, and the development and application of microbiome-based therapeutics.My research program examines how the intestinal microbiome contributes to chronic inflammatory disease, obesity, and metabolic dysfunction. The Pai Lab’s work spans nutrition science, microbiome therapeutics—including clinical trials of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT)—and the development of novel microbial and metabolomic biomarkers for diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Our research is actively conducted across CHOP (Philadelphia, USA) and McMaster Children’s Hospital (Hamilton, Canada).I receive funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), McMaster University, the Province of Ontario, Hamilton Health Sciences, and CHOP, and am a recipient of the ASPEN Stanley Dudrick Mid-Career Research Award and the Canadian Nutrition Society Early Career Researcher Award. I regularly deliver invited lectures and symposia to academic and clinical audiences internationally. I collaborate extensively with investigators across Canada, the United States, Europe, and with industry partners, and am always interested in building new multicenter partnerships in pediatric nutrition and microbiome research. Through the Center for Microbial Medicine at CHOP, I support efforts to bridge preclinical discovery with rigorous, patient-facing clinical trials. I work with an exemplary team to build the infrastructure needed to establish a robust, pediatric microbiome therapeutics pipeline, advance translational research, and enable investigator-initiated and multicenter studies that move microbial diagnostics and therapies from bench to bedside.