December 14-15, 2021
Research professor at the Department of Bioscience Engineering of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In 2011, she was offered a tenure track position as the University of Antwerp, where she set up the Laboratory for Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology of the ENdEMIC research group.
The major research topics are all centred around applications of beneficial bacteria and microbiome research, with a strong focus on lactobacilli. She studies the interaction mechanisms between bacteria and humans to develop microbiological alternatives for antibiotics such as probiotics. In 2020, she was awarded with an ERC Starting Grant that enables her to gain more in-depth knowledge of the evolutionary history and ecology of lactobacilli (https://www.lebeerlab.com). One of the highlights of this ERC project is the Citizen Science project Isala on the female microbiome (https://isala.be).
