Dr. Maria Grant is the Eivor and Alston Callahan, M.D., Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology and Professor, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. Most recently, she has worked on understanding the interactions between the gut microbiome, plasma microbiome, and bacterial derived peptides and metabolites on diseases of the eye and on pathogenesis of severe COVID infection.