Atlantic Organizing Committee
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Rega institute, KU Leuven
KU Leuven - Campus Gasthuisberg
Herestraat 49 - box 1028
3000 Leuven
Belgium
Dr. Muriel Derrien is scientist with over two decades of experience in gut microbiota research. Her PhD at Wageningen University contributed to the launch of Akkermansia muciniphila, a next-generation beneficial microbe. She continued her research on gut microbiota-host interactions during her postdoctoral work at the Top Institute in Food and Nutrition in the Netherlands, focusing on ecosystem-host interaction. In 2010, she joined Danone Nutricia Research in France, with the objective to translate microbiome science into applications for human health, implementing new research directions. She built new lines of research including adult-commensal bacteria as new probiotics, and additionally contributed to implementing more precise approaches taking into account of the gut microbiome through the study of intervention studies and population-based cohorts.. Since 2023, she has is a senior scientist at VIB-KU Leuven in Belgium (Jeroen Raes Lab), coordinating human-based studies to develop microbiome-targeted health strategies, including drugs, dietary components with sub-optimal microbiome configurations, and link them to mechanistic insight using in vitro an ex vivo approaches.