Sue Ishaq, Ph.D., is an associate professor of microbiomes at the University of Maine, in the School of Food and Agriculture. She received her doctorate in animal, nutrition and food science from the University of Vermont in 2015, where her graduate study focused on the rumen microbiology of the moose. She held post-doctoral positions in bioinformatics and microbial ecology at Montana State University, and a research faculty position at the University of Oregon.

Over the years, Ishaq's research has gone from wild animal gut microbiomes, to soils, to buildings, and back to the gut. Since 2019, her lab in Maine has focused on host-associated microbial communities in animals and humans and, in particular, how host and microbes interact in the gut and can be harnessed to reduce inflammation.

Ishaq is the founder of the Microbes and Social Equity working group, an international research community which formed to examine, publicize and promote a research program on the reciprocal impact of social inequality and microbiomes, both human and environmental. Ishaq organizes an annual speaker series, annual virtual symposium and was the lead editor on a microbes and social equity special collection with the ASM mSystems journal.