Senior Editor

Sarah did a master in Bioscience Engineering: cell and gene technology (major) and food & health (minor) at KU Leuven and graduated in 2004. She then did her PhD research at the Centre of Microbial and Plant Genetics of the KU Leuven under the supervision of Prof. Jos Vanderleyden and Dr. Sigrid De Keersmaecker. Since her master thesis, she has been studying probiotic bacteria, with Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG) as model probiotic strain. In her PhD research from 2004-2008, she has mainly explored molecular adaptation and probiotic factors for the application against inflammatory bowel diseases. In her postdoc research, she has first worked on protein glycosylation in lactobacilli and then switched to vaginal lactobacilli and mucosal immunology. Thanks to a joint research project (Centre of Excellence) with Prof. J. Balzarini and Prof. D. Schols from REGA at KU Leuven, she became interested in how vaginal lactobacilli could inhibit viral pathogens such as HIV and HSV. In 2011, she started as a research professor at the University of Antwerp, within the Department of Bioscience Engineering and Faculty of Science. She is responsible for the educational line on cell- and gene biotechnology within bioscience engineering. In 2012, she started the Laboratory of Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology in the research group ENdEMIC (Environmental Ecology and Applied Microbiology) of Prof. R. Samson. Her main research interests are still probiotic bacteria and their molecular modes of action, but now especially probiotic applications outside the human gut, including animals and the plant phyllosphere. Since 2016, she is an academic board member of the International Scientific Association on Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP). In 2019, she was awarded an ERC starting grant to explore the beneficial potential of lactobacilli (Lacto-Be, grant agreement ID: 852600). This grant is game-changing: it is the first fundamental research grant in the group to explore the ecology, evolutionary history and core mechanisms behind the beneficial potential of lactobacilli.

Beneficial microbes, Probiotics (gut, vagina, etc.), Microbial analyses and identification, Bacterial genetics, Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics, Metagenomics