Jeroen RAES Professor

Title: Quantitative microbiome profiling in health and disease

Leuven, Belgium

Prof. Jeroen RAES is full professor at KU Leuven since 2013. He has a substantial track record in microbiome research and has been pioneering the analysis and integration of meta-omics datasets (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, meta-metabolomics) with environmental, clinical and dietary data. He was/is involved in the FP7 MetaHIT and NIH Human Microbiome Project (the latter as only European partner), the FP7-MetaCardis. H2020-AD-GUT, H2020-aSynProtec and H2020-SYSCID projects. Jeroen Raes coordinates the Flemish Gut Flora project, a large scale microbiome-focused population cohort in Belgium, as well as the FWO-EOS MiQuant collaborative project. In addition, his lab is performing multiple disease-related projects in a.o. IBD, IBS, PSC, CRC, depression, PD/AD and MS on national (FWO/IWT) funding and develops novel approaches and tools for microbiome research. Key lab equipment includes the AutoMap high-throughput (192 samples/day) automated DNA extraction and sequencing library preparation platform (Hercules funding; sequencing outsourced to KU Leuven/VIB core facilities), an Accuri C6 flow cytometer (KU Leuven CREA funding), and an A35 and an A135 HEPA anaerobic workstation. In addition, the lab has automated fermentation platform operating under anaerobic conditions allowing high-throughput parallelization of milliliter-scale fermentations.

Jeroen Raes has published >170 papers in top ranking journals such as Science (8), Nature (15), Nature Biotechnology (4), Nature Microbiology (6), Nature Reviews Microbiology (2), Gut (11) and PNAS (4). He has an h-factor of 69 and his work has been cited >37.000 (ISI). He has received multiple awards and recognitions, among which a selection as FWO Oddysseus Fellow, a Francqui Chair and selection for Cell journal’s “40 under 40” promising young scientists. His 2011 paper in Nature was selected by Science as part of their “Top 10 breakthroughs of the year 2011”. His group, established in 2009, currently consists of 24 scientists, with expertise in bioinformatics, systems biology, clinical research and microbiology. He is associate editor for ISME journal and senior editor for mSystems (ASM), and reviews on a regular basis for a.o. Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature communications, Nature Microbiology, PLoS biology, PNAS, Nature biotechnology and the Nature Reviews series. He has been part of review panels for ANR, FNRS, FP7 and NWO, and served as ad hoc reviewer for ERC, NSF, Sloan Foundation, US Army and HFSP. His work has been picked up in international popular press, television and social media on a regular basis. He is member of the Belgian Society of Microbiology and the International Society of Computational Biology, and a regular invited speaker at scientific conferences (e.g. Gordon, ISME).

Selected papers:

1. Arumugam M*, Raes J*, [40 authors], Bork P (2011). Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome. Nature. 473:174-80.

2. Falony G*, Joossens M*, Vieira-Silva S*, Wang J*, [22 authors] and Raes J. (2016) Population-level analysis of gut microbiome variation. Science. 352:560-4

3. Vieira-Silva S*, Falony G*, Lima-Mendez G, Darzi Y, Garcia Yunta R, Okuda S, Vandeputte D, Hildebrand F, Chaffron S and Raes J. (2016) Species-function relationships shape ecological properties of the human gut microbiome. Nature Microbiology. 1:16088

4.Vandeputte D, Kathagen G, D’hoe K, Vieira-Silva S, Valles-Collomer M, Sabino J, Wang J, Tito RY, De Commer L, Darzi Y, Vermeire S, Falony G & Raes J (2017) Quantitative microbiome profiling links gut community variation to microbial load. Nature. 551: 507-511

5. Vieira-Silva S, Falony G, Belda E, Nielsen T, [41 authors], Bäckhed F, Clement K & Raes J. (2020) Statin therapy is associated with lower prevalence of gut microbiota dysbiosis, Nature 581:310–315