Camille Goemans started her lab at EPFL in Lausanne in 2023 to better understand how antibiotics and non-antibiotic drugs affect the diverse bacteria from the human gut microbiota and how they contribute to dysbiosis and the development of antibiotic resistance. “Antimicrobial resistance is directly responsible for at least one million deaths per year globally and projections indicate a twofold surge in resistance to last-resort antibiotics by 2035,” she says. “It is one of the top global health threats and it has become increasingly urgent to develop robust antimicrobial medicines.”
Her PhD at the de Duve Institute, UCLouvain in Belgium focussed on microbiology and biochemistry, before her EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship at EMBL in Heidelberg expanded her expertise into systems biology and specifically the impact of antibiotics on the human gut microbiota. “EMBO was the stepping stone that allowed me to start my postdoctoral research,” she says. “I worked on a global screen of 40 bacteria and 144 antibiotics, allowing me to delve into what is still today my main motivation to get into the lab.”
Goemans’ EMBO fellowship came during the COVID-19 pandemic and as a result she missed the traditional in-person networking opportunities that form a key component of the award but was able to attend for the online course from EMBO Solutions in Lab Leadership. “We are a small team of a dozen people,” Goemans says of her current lab. “There are skills that you need to run a lab that are not taught in traditional settings. EMBO has been in this way particularly instrumental in supporting me and my career.”
