Meet our speakers of Day 2

Teagasc Food Research Centre and APC Microbiome Ireland, Ireland

Prof. Paul Cotter is the Head of Food Biosciences at Teagasc, is a Principal Investigator with the large Irish Research Centres, APC Microbiome Ireland, VistaMilk and Food for Health Ireland and CTO/co-founder of SeqBiome, a microbiome sequencing and bioinformatics service provider.
He is a molecular microbiologist, with a particular focus on the microbiology of foods (especially fermented foods), the food chain and of humans, as well as probiotics and postbiotics. Prof Cotter is the author of >400 peer-reviewed, was included in the Clarivate list of highly cited researchers for 2018-2023, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp in 2024 and is the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Microbiology.  

Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Japan

Born in Nakanojo, Gunma, Japan (1962). Completed a Ph.D. course at the Graduate Department of Community Health, University of Toronto, Canada (1996). Researcher (Postdoctoral Fellow) at the Thermal Physiology Research Group, Defense and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine, Canada (1996-1997). Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Human Life and Environment, Nara Women’s University, Japan; and Part-time Lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, Osaka University, Japan (1997-1999). Head at the Exercise Sciences Research Group, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Japan (1999-present)

Yakult Honsha European Research Center for Microbiology, Belgium.

Masatoshi Morikawa, M. Eng., is an Associate Senior Researcher of Yakult Honsha European Research Center for Microbiology VOF (YHER), Belgium, since June 2024. He received Master Degree of Engineering in Department of Bioengineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. He started working at Yakult Central Institute, Japan in 2011, where he studied the effects of gut microbiota and probiotics on immune cells. His major interest is phagocytes, such as macrophages and dendritic cells, and he focuses on how phagocytes are regulated by the gut microbiome and probiotics, and how phagocytes elicit immune responses against viral infection and cancer.

Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK & Amsterdam UMC

Bastiaan Haak is an Infectious Diseases physician in training with a special interest in translational microbiome science. He conducted doctoral research at the Amsterdam UMC and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, focusing on the immunomodulatory role of the intestinal microbiota in the protection against respiratory tract infections. He was recently awarded a Niels Stensen Fellowship, which allowed him to pause his clinical training and work as a senior scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Here, he aims to identify novel microbiota-derived therapies that might benefit patients most vulnerable to severe outcomes from infectious diseases.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Egija Zaura is a Full professor of Oral Microbial Ecology in the Department of Preventive Dentistry at the Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam (ACTA), the Netherlands. She holds a degree in dentistry from Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and Riga Stradins University, Latvia, as well as a Master’s degree in General Dentistry from Riga Stradins University. She obtianed her PhD in Preventive Dentistry from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her current research focuses on understanding oral microbial ecology in both health and disease and translating this fundamental knowledge into clinical practice.

University of Bonn, Germany

Marie-Christine Simon is a junior professor for nutrition and microbiome at the Institute of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Bonn. She heads the junior research group of the Diet Body Brain competence cluster funded by the BMBF and has several years of experience in nutrition-related microbiome research. 

Already during her doctorate at the German Diabetes Center in Düsseldorf, Marie-Christine Simon conducted human intervention studies and investigated, for example, the influence of probiotics on insulin resistance, the incretin effect and the inflammatory status in overweight and slim subjects. She therefore has very extensive knowledge of diabetes-related metabolic and immune changes and brings with her her scientific understanding from her studies in nutritional science. 

 In addition, she is certified as a Clinical Research Associate and as a registered nutritional therapist. This and her broad expertise in clinical research make her highly qualified to conduct professional nutritional intervention studies. She has a strong scientific background in microbiome research, which she acquired during her postdoc in the laboratory of Prof. Fredrik Bäckhed, Wallenberg Laboratory, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her overall goal is to gain a better understanding of the mechanistic involvement of the microbiome in human physiology and pathophysiology, covering key aspects of nutrition, immunology and metabolism. Women’s health, more specifically the metabolic changes during the physiological cycle, is also a research topic in her working group. 

University Medical Centre Groningen, The Neterlands

Dr. Jingyuan Fu is a professor of systems medicine in the University Medical Centre Groningen, the Netherlands, with a particular focus on integrative genomics and host-microbe interactions in complex diseases. She obtained a BSc in Biochemistry, a MSc in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (cum laude), and a PhD in systems genetics (cum laude). Via this route she developed her research line on systems genetics in complex traits and became an expert in integrative genomics and systems biology.

Her research aims to acquire a greater knowledge of how the human genome and the gut microbiome interact with each other and affect human health, in order to create better methods for disease prediction, prevention, and treatment. To accomplish this, her study combines with large-scale genetic and microbial association studies in big groups of individuals with functional studies using advanced bacterial culturing and organ-on-a-chip technologies.

She holds numerous prestigious personal grants (NWO-VENI VIDI VICI, and ERC-CoG) and several (inter)national consortia grants. She is a laureate of AMMODO Science Award in 2023 and is recognized as an “Highly Cited Researcher” by Web of Science since 2020.