Sara Vieira-Silva

Sara Vieira-Silva is an associate Professor at the University Medical Center, JGU Mainz, Adjunct Director at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), and on the board of the Institute for Quantitative & Computational Biosciences (IQCB).
Initially trained in biology and computational biology (Lisbon, Portugal), she conducted a PhD in microbial evolutionary genomics, supervised by Eduardo Rocha at Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. As a postdoctoral scientist (VIB-KULeuven, Belgium), she specialized in studying microbial metabolism specific to the human gut environment and its clinical impact on the human host.
Her main research interests are in defining the boundaries of the healthy human gut microbiota variation and the role of dysbiosis in disease, especially through the promotion of inflammation and microbial metabolism of bioactive compounds. She combines her background in microbial comparative genomics and evolutionary ecology, with hypothesis-driven experimental design in close collaboration with clinical experts. She embraces and develops state-of-the art computational approaches to study quantitatively the contribution of host-associated microbial communities to pathophysiology and response to therapy, notably in the clinical context of inflammatory and metabolic disorders.