Dr. Buffington graduated Summa cum laude from the University of Arkansas with a degree in chemistry in 2007. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Baylor College of Medicine in 2012, where she went on to postdoc with Mauro Costa-Mattioli. Here, she began investigating the relationship between maternal obesity and heightened risk for neurodevelopmental disorders in offspring. Now, she and her NIH R01-funded research team are studying how environmental exposures that disrupt the maternal gut microbiome and its remodeling during pregnancy influence fetal programming of brain development and behavior and applying the resulting data to inform microbiome-targeted therapeutic approaches to reduce risk for neurodevelopmental disorders. Her work has been published in many high-profile journals, including Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, and Cell, and featured by popular news outlets such as The Economist and The New York Times.