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Microbiome research

56 articles

Alexandra Zhernakova

Alexandra Zhernakova (Александра Жернакова) is a Dutch-based microbiome and immunology researcher, full professor at University Medical Center Groningen since 2020, known for her 2016 Science study of 1,135 gut microbiomes.

Andrew Goodman (microbiologist)

Andrew L. Goodman is an American microbiologist, C.N.H. Long Professor and Chair of Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale, who studies how gut bacteria transform medical drugs and alter drug toxicity.

Andrew T. Gewirtz

Andrew T. Gewirtz is an American immunologist and microbiome researcher at Georgia State University, known for showing that dietary emulsifiers alter gut bacteria and promote colitis in mice.

Brett Finlay

Brett Finlay, born 1959 in Edmonton, Alberta, is a Canadian microbiologist and University of British Columbia professor emeritus known for E. coli pathogenesis, SARS vaccine work, and microbiome research.

Christoph Thaiss

Christoph Thaiss is a microbiome researcher who studies how the gut, brain, immune system, and metabolism interact, and is a professor at Stanford University and the Arc Institute.

Cisca Wijmenga

Cisca Wijmenga is a Dutch human geneticist and Lodewijk Sandkuijl Professor at the University of Groningen, known for celiac disease genetics and gut microbiome research, who served as Rector Magnificus from 2019 to 2023.

Curtis Huttenhower

Curtis Huttenhower is a computational biologist at Harvard and the Broad Institute known for his work on the human microbiome and the NIH Human Microbiome Project.

Dan Littman

Dan R. Littman is an American immunologist at NYU Grossman School of Medicine whose laboratory defined Th17 cells and identified the HIV receptor complex CD4 and CCR5.

David A. Stahl

David A. Stahl is an American environmental microbiologist who applied molecular tools to microbial communities and isolated the first ammonia-oxidizing archaeon, reported in Nature in 2005.

David Relman

David A. Relman is an American microbiologist and physician at Stanford University whose sequence-based methods identified uncultured disease-causing bacteria and opened the modern study of the human microbiome.

Elaine Hsiao

Elaine Y. Hsiao is a microbiome researcher at UCLA who studies how gut microbes influence brain development, known for work connecting gut bacteria to autism and epilepsy.

Eran Elinav

Eran Elinav is an Israeli physician-scientist who studies how the gut microbiome interacts with the human body, heading the Department of Systems Immunology at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.

Eran Segal

Eran Segal is an Israeli computational biologist, born in Tel Aviv in 1973, who is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science known for personalized nutrition research.

Eric Alm

Eric J. Alm is a computational biologist and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT who studies the human gut microbiome and helped launch OpenBiome and Finch Therapeutics.

Erika von Mutius

Erika von Mutius, born 1957, is a German pediatrician and epidemiologist whose research on farming environments reshaped the hygiene hypothesis, showing farm children have lower asthma rates.

François Leulier

François Leulier is a French CNRS researcher who leads the Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon in Lyon, best known for defining the mutualism between Lactobacillus plantarum and the fruit fly Drosophila.

Fredrik Bäckhed

Fredrik Bäckhed is a Swedish microbiome researcher and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Gothenburg, known for showing how gut bacteria affect fat storage and insulin signaling.

Gary D. Wu

Gary D. Wu is an American physician-scientist and molecular biologist at the University of Pennsylvania known for linking long-term dietary patterns to gut microbial enterotypes.

Gene Tyson

Gene W. Tyson is an Australian microbial ecologist and bioinformatician at Queensland University of Technology, known for metagenomics and for CheckM, a widely used genome-quality tool.

Harry Gilbert (biochemist)

Harry Gilbert was a biochemist and glycobiologist, Professor of Agricultural Biochemistry at Newcastle University, known for showing how gut bacteria break down complex carbohydrates; he died in 2025.

Harry Sokol

Harry Sokol is a French gastroenterologist and microbiome researcher, professor at Sorbonne Université and Hôpital Saint-Antoine, known for work on gut microbiota in inflammatory bowel disease.

Jack Gilbert

Jack A. Gilbert is a microbial ecologist, professor of microbial oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project and American Gut Project.

Jeffrey I. Gordon

Jeffrey I. Gordon (born 1947) is an American physician and microbiome scientist who pioneered the study of the human gut microbiome and its role in childhood undernutrition.

Jennifer Barrila

Jennifer Barrila is a microbiologist and Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University known for studying how spaceflight alters microbial virulence and host-pathogen interactions, and for receiving a PECASE award from NASA.

Jens Walter

Jens Walter is a microbiome scientist and professor at University College Cork since 2020, known for the 2025 NiMe diet trial that lowered cholesterol and inflammation.

Jeroen Raes

Jeroen Raes is a Belgian microbiome researcher, professor at KU Leuven and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Bacteriology at the Rega Institute, known for gut enterotypes.

Jo Handelsman

Jo Handelsman is an American microbiologist, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at UW–Madison, known for pioneering functional metagenomics and for studies of gender bias in science.

John F. Cryan

John F. Cryan is an Irish neuroscientist, Professor and Chair of Anatomy and Neuroscience at University College Cork, known for research on the microbiome-gut-brain axis in stress and psychiatric disorders.

Julia Oh

Julia Oh is a microbiome researcher and professor at Duke University, where she directs the Duke Microbiome Center and studies the human skin microbiome; she received an NIH New Innovator Award in 2017.

Julia Vorholt

Julia A. Vorholt is a German microbiologist and full professor of microbiology at ETH Zurich, known for research on plant microbiomes, synthetic methylotrophy, and single-cell FluidFM methods.