My guest this week is Tiffany Scharschmidt, a close colleague of mine in the UCSF Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine. I really admire how well-spoken she is and how carefully considered her research and other scholarly work is, a stark contrast to my own “fire, ready, aim” approach. Another remarkable fact about Tiffany is that she never got a Ph.D. Instead, she transitioned directly from an M.D. to a translational research program that spans deep molecular mechanism to clinical studies. Hear why and how she made that switch, whether or not microbes may someday cure skin disease, and what the big questions are in skin microbiome research.