"I was lucky to marry someone as wonderful as Gloria," says Blaser, the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and professor of medicine and microbiology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
"There's a lot of respect and love between us," says Dominguez-Bello, director of the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health, the Henry Rutgers Professor of Microbiome and Health in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Arts and Sciences.
The couple, who investigate the microbiome—the massive collection of bodily bacteria that regulate our health—will celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary next month. Both had been married before and started dating a decade after they first met, commuting from 2008-2012 whenever they could between San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Dominguez-Bello worked as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico to New York where Blaser was teaching at New York University.
"I didn't remember that this woman was so beautiful," Blaser remembers thinking when their paths crossed again in 2008 at a scientific meeting. "Then I realized how intelligent and how nice she was and what a good character she had."