Dr. Georg Zeller

Prof. Georg Zeller is a leading computational microbiome scientist heading a research group (https://zellerlab.org/) at the Leiden University Center for Infectious Diseases (LUCID) that is part of the Leiden University Medical Center. He is broadly interested in microbe-host interactions, in particular in the human gut, and studies their impact on human health and disease.

He received his PhD for work on machine learning applications in genomics carried out at the Max Planck Institutes in Tübingen and completed postdoctoral training on the human microbiome and its associations with disease at EMBL Heidelberg with Prof. Peer Bork. In 2015, Prof. Zeller became an independent EMBL Team Leader before joining the LUMC in November 2023.

His research group focuses on the development of computational strategies to extract robust microbiome signatures for various diseases and therapeutic outcomes from large-scale metagenomic datasets. His work combines machine learning, statistical modeling, and multi-omics integration in order to gain new insights into microbe-host interactions from high-dimensional data. He aims to translate this knowledge into clinically relevant applications such as diagnostics, microbiome modulation, dietary interventions, and personalized medicine.

His work on the human gut microbiome has been published in Nature, Science, Nature Methods, Nature Microbiology and includes a 2019 Nature Medicine publication delineating a robust gut microbiome signature for colorectal cancer derived in one of the first microbiome meta-analyses. His current work on spatial analysis of microbes in cancerous and inflamed tissues is supported by an ERC Synergy Grant.