Erik Bakkeren
Appointment
CIFAR Global Scholars 2026-2028
CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human
About
Humans are colonized by trillions of microbes: roughly the same as the number of human cells in the body. These microbes are collectively called the human microbiome and have many beneficial functions to our health. However, the sheer number and diversity of species in the microbiome make it challenging to understand how they exert their beneficial functions and whether we can influence them to be more helpful. Erik Bakkeren studies the interactions between microbes to understand what drives the composition of a microbiome, how a given composition influences our health and how we might engineer microbiomes for our own benefit.
Awards
- Marvellous Mentor Award, Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, 2025
- Postdoc Mobility Fellowship, Swiss National Science Foundation, 2022-2024
- Swiss Society for Microbiology PhD Award, Swiss Society for Microbiology, 2022
- Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship, Swiss National Science Foundation, 2021-2022
- Boehringer Ingelheim PhD Fellowship, Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, 2018-2019
Relevant Publications
- Bakkeren E, Piskovsky V, Lee MNY, Jahn MT, Foster KR. (2025). Strain displacement in microbiomes via ecological competition. Nature Microbiololgy. 10, 3122-3135. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-025-02162-w
- Spragge F*, Bakkeren E*, Jahn MT, Araujo EBN, Pearson CF, Wang X, Pankhurst L, Cunrath O, Foster KR. (2023). Microbiome diversity protects against pathogens by nutrient blocking. Science. 328, eadj3502. DOI: 10.1126/science.adj3502
- Bakkeren E, Huisman JS, Fattinger SA, Hausmann A, Furter M, Egli A, Slack E, Sellin ME, Bonhoeffer S, Regoes RR, Diard M, Hardt WD. (2019). Salmonella persisters promote the spread of antibiotic resistance plasmids in the gut. Nature. 573, 276–280. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1521-8