About the Editors

Editors-in-Chief  

Jean-Marc Ghigo, PhD
Professor, Head of Genetics of Biofilms Laboratory
Institut Pasteur
Paris, France
 


Dr. Ghigo's research has contributed to a better understanding of the biological resources used by commensal and pathogenic bacteria to form biofilms. The Ghigo lab is currently focusing on the identification of the structures involved in bacteria-surface interactions and of the physiological adaptations to biofilm microenvironments leading to the emergence of biofilm-associated properties, with particular emphasis on biofilm tolerance to antibiotics. Some aspects of his research also aim to translate these fundamental approaches towards clinically relevant situations involving biofilms. 

Tiffany Weir headshotTiffany Weir, PhD
Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition
Colorado State University
Colorado, USA


Dr. Weir’s research program utilizes clinical and pre-clinical research models to explore the interactions between the diet, gut microbiome, and human health. Current projects include understanding the role of the microbiome in the initiation of obesity-associated vascular dysfunction and exploring how fasting-induced microbiome modulation impacts susceptibility to acute infections. We are also conducting/collaborating on several human clinical studies examining the safety and efficacy of probiotic supplements and prebiotic foods on intestinal and cardiometabolic health.

Deputy Editor

Omry Koren, PhD
Professor, Head of Microbiome Research Lab
Bar-Ilan University
Safed, Israel
 

Dr Koren's research focuses on the interactions between the gut microbiota and the host, with a primary interest in the interplay between the microbiota and the host endocrine system. A good example of this is in pregnancy, during which significant changes in microbiota composition, host hormonal levels and immune responsiveness all converge to promote healthy fetal development, and in which certain pregnancy complications may be associated with alterations in the microbiota.

Managing Editor

Nico Fanget, PhD

 



Nico obtained his PhD in bacteriology and molecular biology at Edinburgh Napier University. He then moved to scholarly publishing, first as staff editor at the Microbiology Society, then as copy editor at Nature. Nico joined the Nature partner Journals in 2016, and now manages four npj series titles.

He is based in London.

Associate Editors

Adrian-Stefan Andrei, PhD
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology
University of Zurich
Kilchberg, Switzerland
 

Stefan Andrei’s group, the Microbial Evogenomics Lab (MiEL), utilizes computational biology approaches to unveil and elucidate the ecological processes driving bacterial evolution and adaptation, as well as the mechanisms responsible for microbiome cohesion. In his research, he routinely employs bioinformatics, evolutionary genomics, and multiomics techniques to unravel the eco-evolutionary foundations of microbial diversity.

Tom Battin, PhD
Professor
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Lausanne, Switzerland
 

Tom Battin's lab, the "Stream Biofilm and Ecosystem Research Laboratory," at EPFL is interested in biofilms, the dominant form of microbial life in streams, and they study the assembly of these microbial “jungles” and the biodiversity dynamics therein ranging from the microbial scale to the scale of the entire stream networks. His principal interest is the microbial ecology and biogeochemistry of stream ecosystems. He is a pioneer in the observation of biofilms in the context of stream dynamics. His research has contributed to the development and use of advanced analytical methods for improving and understanding the structure and function of sedimentary microbial communities in shallow freshwater.

Erin S Gloag, PhD
Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology
Virginia Tech
VA, USA


The research mission of the Gloag Lab is to discover and understand the mechanisms by which pathogenic bacterial biofilms persist in a host to establish chronic infections. To achieve this mission the Gloag Lab uses multidisciplinary approaches, including in vitro and in vivo biofilm models, molecular microbiology, rheology, next generation sequencing and microscopy.

Ara Koh headshotAra Koh, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Life Sciences
POSTECH
Pohang, South Korea

Dr. Ara Koh's research focuses on understanding how the gut microbiome influences human diseases (such as diabetes, cancer, and necrotizing enterocolitis) and responds to therapeutic interventions (including drugs, surgery, and diet). The goal is to develop microbiome-based therapeutics that can reduce inter-individual variations. Specifically, Dr. Koh's lab investigates the role of microbially produced metabolites and their interactions with host signaling pathways, which are important for host metabolism. The research employs various methods such as microbiome community cultures, human tissue-derived organoid systems, cell culture systems, and relevant disease models.

Iñigo Lasa, PhD
Professor, Microbial Pathogenesis unit.
Navarrabiomed-Universidad Publica de Navarra
Pamplona, Spain
 

Iñigo Lasa is Professor of Microbiology at Universidad Publica de Navarra, Spain since 2008. He received his Ph.D. (1993) from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. From 1995 - 1997, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut Pasteur working in the laboratory of Prof. Pascale Cossart. His research group is dedicated to decipher the regulatory networks involved in biofilm development and the relevance of biofilm formation during bacterial infection.

Tiphaine Le Roy, PhD
Assistant Professor
Sorbonne Université, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale 
Paris, France


Dr Tiphaine Le Roy's research focuses on the contribution of the gut microbiota to obesity and associated metabolic diseases from the perspective of microbial physiology and how microbes adapt to the gut environment and interact with the host. Her research approaches include the isolation and the in vitro study of novel microbes from the human small intestinal microbiota and the study of host-microbiota interactions using jejunal organoids and animal models.

Michael S RobesonMichael S. Robeson, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
AR, USA
 

Dr. Robeson is a bioinformaticist, microbiome scientist, and educator with extensive experience publishing on diverse topics in bioinformatics and biology. Most notably, he is a key contributor of a variety of microbial community analysis tools, and has helped develop eDNA analysis pipelines used by both academic and commercial organizations. Currently, his lab specializes in investigating the microbial communities associated with human disease states.

Zakee Sabree, PhD
Ohio State University
Ohio, USA



Zakee Sabree’s research centers on identifying functional and trophic relationships that forge host-microbe interactions and shape bacterial communities, as well as traits that can predict the evolutionary outcomes of these symbioses. He also has pioneered the development of new insect model systems for host-microbiome research.

Nicola SegataNicola Segata, PhD
Professor, Department CIBIO
University of Trento
Trento, Italy
 

The research of Prof. Nicola Segata employs experimental metagenomic tools and novel computational approaches to study the diversity of the microbiome across conditions and populations and its role in human diseases. The projects in the lab include efforts to profile microbiomes with strain-level resolution, to meta-analyse very large sets of metagenomes with novel computational tools, and to uncover previously uncharacterized members of the human microbiome. The lab of prof. Nicola Segata developed several computational tools and resources that are widely adopted by the microbiome research community and enabled a number of metagenomic-based discoveries.

Founding Editor-in-Chief

Staffan Normark
Professor, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Since the 1970s, Prof. Normark has performed pioneering work on genetic engineering, molecular biology, and microbial pathogenesis. He was the Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 2010 to 2015. 

Emeritus Editor-in-Chief

Alain Filloux, PhD
Director of SCELSE
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore

Prof. Alain Filloux is an international leader in studying Pseudomonas aeruginosa pathogenesis. He pointed to the existence of bacterial protein secretion systems, which later became known as types (T1SS, T2SS, T3SS, etc.) and published seminal papers on the T2SS.

Cathy Lozupone, PhD
Prof. Anschutz Medical Campus School of Medicine
University of Colorado Boulder
USA

 

Dr. Catherine Lozupone is an Associate Professor at the Anschutz Medical Campus School of Medicine. Catherine's expertise is microbiology of the human gut and impacts on health, development of bioinformatics techniques for analysis of marker gene and genomic sequence data. The main focus of her research is to understand factors that shape human microbiota composition in health and disease and to elucidate the functional consequences of compositional differences, both in terms of the biological/metabolic properties of individual bacteria and host interactions. Dr. Lozupone developed popular tools for microbiome data analysis, most notably the UniFrac Algorithm .

Advisory Editors

Javier Martinez Vesga
Javier joined Nature Communications in January 2018. He received his PhD in Virology from the University of Saarland in Germany where he studied HIV-1 drug-resistant variants. After that he moved to the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig where he did research on host-acting broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. He then joined the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona as Assistant Professor where he taught microbiology and focused his research on HIV latency and RNA viruses. Javier is based in the Berlin office and primarily handles papers in the fields of human and animal microbiomes, host-microbes and bacteriology.

Emily WhiteEmily White
Emily received a B.Sc. in Microbiology and further developed her knowledge by studying for a PhD in Microbiology at the University of Manchester. Her time was split between the laboratories of Ian Roberts and Richard Grencis, looking at the interactions between the mammalian intestinal microbiota and the intestinal helminth parasite Trichuris muris. Emily joined the Nature Microbiology team in November 2016 where she handles papers on the microbiome and microbial ecology. Emily has been Advisory Editor on npj Biofilms and Microbiomes since July 2021.
 

Editorial Board

Fredrik Bäckhed Department of Molecular and Clinical MedicineUniversity of Gothenburg, Sweden

Jill Banfield Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA

Ehud Banin The Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Martin J Blaser Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

Cameron Currie Department of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Joël Doré Unit for Ecology and Physiology of the Digestive System, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), France

Nicole Dubilier Department of Symbiosis, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany

Hans-Curt Flemming Biofilm Centre, Faculty of Chemistry, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Hervé Guillou Unit ToxAlim, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), Toulouse, France

Bill Hanage Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusettes, USA

Susanne Häussler Head of Molecular Bacteriology, TWINCORE, Hannover, Germany,

Harald Horn Engler-Bunte-Institut, Water Chemistry and Water Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Jurg Keller Advanced Water Management Centre, University of Queensland, Australia

Hiroaki Kitano The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, Japan

Rob Knight Departments of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering, University of California at San Diego, California, USA

Ilana Kolodkin-Gal The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel

Katherine P. Lemon Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, USA

Jose L. Lopez-Ribot Department of Biology, The University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas, USA

Sandra L. McLellan, School of Freshwater Sciences, University of Wisconsin, WI, USA

Annette Moter Biofilmcenter, German Heart Center Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Thomas R. Neu Department of River Ecology, Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Magdeburg, Germany

Jens Nielsen Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Staffan Normark Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Victoria Orphan Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, California, USA

Sven Pettersson Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Lutgarde Raskin Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Michigan, USA

David A. Relman Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University, California, USA

Scott A. Rice The School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

Agneta Richter-Dahlfors Swedish Medical Nanoscience Center, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Ute Römling Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Philippe Sansonetti Laboratory of Molecular Microbial Pathogenesis, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France

Phil Stewart Centre for Biofilm Engineering, Montana State University, Montana, USA

Marc Strous Energy Bioengineering and Geomicrobiology Research Group, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Tim Tolker-Nielsen Department of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Willy Verstraete Emeritus Professor, Laboratory of Microbial Ecology and Technology (LabMET), Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Belgium

Tom Van de Wiele Laboratory of Microbial Ecology and Technology, Ghent University, Belgium

Bryan A. White Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Illinois, USA

Marvin Whiteley Georgia Tech, Georgia, USA

 

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