Senior Editor

Dr. Erwin Zoetendal is an Associate Professor at the Laboratory of Microbiology of Wageningen University & Research. Dr. Zoetendal studied Biology with Microbial Ecology as a specialty at the University of Groningen. Afterward, he got his Ph.D. in 2001 the research focusing on molecular characterization of bacterial communities in the human gastrointestinal tract at Wageningen University & Research. After performing postdoc research at the Institute of Applied Biotechnology, the University of Kuopio, Finland, and the Department of Animal Sciences, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, respectively; Zoetendal returned in 2004 as a postdoc at the Laboratory of Microbiology, Wageningen University & Research. Since October 2015, he is an Associate Professor at the Laboratory of Microbiology, Wageningen University & Research. In December 2014, Zoetendal received an honorary appointment as Guest Professor at Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China. The research of Dr. Zoetendal focuses on the role of the microbiome in the intestine and how this is related to diet and health. In his research, a wide variety of culture-independent methods are used to characterize the microbiota composition and -activity in cohorts of healthy and compromised subjects in combination with dedicated in vitro laboratory experiments using fecal slurries and defined cultures with the ambition to understand the ecology of the intestinal ecosystem. Zoetendal’s research has been funded by various national and international funding agencies such as NWO, FP7, NIH, NWO-CCC, Eurostars, and CSC fellowships. Zoetendal is a well-recognized expert in intestinal microbiology and was one of the pioneers in using 16S ribosomal RNA technologies to study the intestinal microbiota in humans. He has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals and textbooks, including Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Gut, the ISME Journal, and Gastroenterology. His H-index is 69 (July 2021, Google Scholar). He has given numerous lectures at international and local meetings, including the Rome Foundation AGA Institute Lectureship at the Digestive Disease Week 2010. Besides presenting at scientific meetings, Zoetendal is also frequently asked to give lectures at Ph.D. courses, dedicated courses for professionals in the field of medicine and nutrition such as dieticians, or general public events such as Rotary meetings. Moreover, he is an elected member of the Rome Foundation as well as a member of the Editorial Board or Ad Hoc Reviewer of several international journals.

Intestinal microbiota, Microbial ecology