Program Highlights

Dr. Michael Gänzle is trained as Food Engineer at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, and obtained his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees in Food Microbiology at the University of Hohenheim and the Technical University of Munich, respectively. He is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Food Microbiology and Probiotics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023. From 2021 to 2024, he was recognized as Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. His research links microbial phylogeny, physiology and ecology to food quality, food safety and host health. More information is provided on the institutional homepage.

Dr. Siyun Wang is a Professor and the principal investigator of the Wang Lab of Molecular Food Safety at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches and conducts research on ensuring a safer food supply system by tackling microbial pathogens. Siyun has authored over 80 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on microbial food safety. Awards she received included the Food Safety Award from BC Food Protection Association, the Young Researcher Initiative from the European Food Safety Authority, and the scholarship for young women scientists underrepresented in STEM from the US National Science Foundation. Siyun currently serves as the Associate Editor (Food Microbiology) of Current Research in Food Science and editorial board members of Journal of Food Protection and Food Microbiology.
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Dr. Ryan Ziels is an Associate Professor of Environmental Systems Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He works within the UBC Department of Civil Engineering. His work focuses on engineering microbiomes to turn waste into energy and clean water.

Dr. Christopher Lawson is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He works in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry. He leads the Microbiome Engineering Laboratory. Dr. Lawson focuses on mixing biology and engineering. He looks at how microorganisms can help the planet. His primary areas of work includes, microbiome Engineering, resource recovery, sustainable wastewater treatment and synthetic biology, creating new biological systems with tools like machine learning.

Dr. Courtney Toth is an environmental microbiologist and Applied Research Chair in Environmental Microbiology at NAIT. Her previous postdoctoral fellowship was in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto (BioZone). She is highly regarded for her award-winning research on anaerobic bioremediation, specifically in developing naturally occurring microbes that degrade toxic petroleum hydrocarbons known as BTEX (Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene, and Xylene).

Omar El-Halfawy is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Chemogenomics and Antimicrobial Research (since August 2020) and an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Regina. His research group works towards uncovering novel mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and microbial virulence and discovering new antimicrobial solutions by studying priority pathogens under infection-mimetic conditions using an interdisciplinary approach encompassing microbiology, biochemistry, molecular and chemical biology, and chemogenomics. Dr. El-Halfawy received his B.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Sciences and M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Microbiology from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 2005 and 2009, respectively, and briefly worked as a Community Pharmacist in Alexandria. He received a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Western Ontario in 2014, focusing on mechanisms of intrinsic antibiotic resistance mediated by metabolites and other bacterial small molecules. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Diseases Research at McMaster University (2015-2020), where he explored novel solutions to target multidrug-resistant bacteria.

Dr. Cox is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada), where she leads a research group focused on understanding and countering antibiotic‑resistant pathogens. With nearly 20 years of experience in antimicrobial resistance, Dr. Cox earned her PhD from the University of Leeds (UK) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship under Dr. Gerry Wright at McMaster University before founding her laboratory in 2017. Her current program explores complex aspects of bacterial physiology in combination with cutting‑edge drug discovery to ultimately combat pathogenic bacteria; specifically, her group investigates novel approaches to control bacterial infections by inhibiting adhesion to the host and studies Gram‑negative efflux pumps to elucidate substrate specificities, physiological functions, and origins—insights that inform future drug discovery efforts and antibiotic stewardship. Dr. Cox has received several awards, including the Canadian Society of Microbiologists ThermoFisher Award, and she chaired the 2026 Gordon Research Conference on New Antibacterial Discovery and Development.

Holly Sutterlin, PhD is a microbial molecular geneticist by training, specializing in the discovery and development of novel antimicrobials for the past decade. Holly currently serves as Co-founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer at Prokaryotics, running day-to-day scientific and business operations. Prior to her role as COO, she served as Director of Biology. Before joining Prokaryotics, Holly served as a disease area biologist in the Department of Infectious Diseases at Merck & Co., where her efforts focused on antibacterial target identification and validation as well as lead compound identification and development.  She has extensive experience with both synthetic small molecule and natural product pipelines geared toward discovery of new antimicrobials to combat multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. Holly received her PhD in 2014 from Princeton University, where she studied Escherichia coli cell envelope biogenesis in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas J. Silhavy. She was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which funded three years of her graduate work. Holly graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Duke University in 2008.

Dr. Yves Brun is a world-renowned scientist and a full professor at the Université de Montréal. He works in the Department of Microbiology, Infectiology, and Immunology. He also holds the prestigious Canada 150 Research Chair in Bacterial Cell Biology. His work helps understand how microscopic organisms live, grow, and stick to surfaces. Before moving his laboratory to Canada, Dr. Brun spent many years teaching and doing research in the United States, at Stanford University (postdoctoral training) and Indiana University where he served as a Distinguished Professor of Biology and led the Microbiology Graduate Program. He moved his research team to Université de Montréal in January 2019 after winning the Canada 150 prize.

Dr. Leluo Guan is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science at the University of Alberta. She is a world-renowned researcher who worked at the university from 2006 until late 2023, serving as a Professor of Functional Genomics and Microbiology and as an Associate Dean. She has since moved to the University of British Columbia but remains connected to the University of Alberta as an emerita professor.

Dr. McArthur is a Professor and the inaugural David Braley Chair in Computational Biology at the Michael G.DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research and Department of Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University. Dr. McArthur has had a 30+ year research career in the United States and Canada, including postdoctoral experience at the National Museum of Natural History and NIH-funded faculty positions at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA) and Brown University, where he led the computational biology of sequencing the genome of the diarrheal pathogen Giardia intestinalis, plus 10 years of experience in the private sector. As part of the McMaster Global Nexus for Pandemics and Biological Threats, his research team focuses on building tools, databases, and algorithms for genomic surveillance of infectious pathogens, and he leads the globally recognized Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (card.mcmaster.ca). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McArthur led the McMaster SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance core on behalf of the Canadian COVID Genomics Network (CanCOGeN) and the Public Health Agency of Canada, developing Canada’s SARS-CoV-2 Illumina GeNome Assembly Line (SIGNAL) software for variant detection. Dr. McArthur’s research program often involves close collaboration with Public Health agencies and license agreements with industrial partners.
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Sherwood Lollar’s research on near-surface groundwater and water resources focuses on the critical role of subsurface microbes in bioremediation of groundwater contamination, and the intersection of the water and carbon cycle. Until recently the long-standing paradigm of the hydrogeologic cycle assumed that most waters returned to the surface water cycle, and deep storage of groundwaters rarely exceeded a few million to tens of million years. Her work has not only increased estimates (by almost 50%) of how much water exists in the Earth’s subsurface, but profoundly pushed back our understanding of how old groundwater can be - demonstrating water ages from hundreds of millions to more than a billion years. In addition to innovative developments of stable isotope geochemistry and noble gas modelling to delineate this vast but little understood part of the Earth’s water cycle, Sherwood Lollar’s research on the carbon cycle has revealed novel metabolic strategies life has evolved to survive in the planet’s subsurface. Her research on subsurface microbial life has identified widespread chemolithotrophic (literally “rock-eating”) microbial communities that gain energy from chemistry rather than light - essential to survival far from the sun’s energy. One of the greatest challenges to understanding how life can be sustained in the Earth’s deep subsurface has been understanding the source of electron donors, acceptors and carbon sources that life requires. Sherwood Lollar’s discoveries demonstrated how deep carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur cycles driven by water-rock reaction and radiolysis sustain deep subsurface microorganisms in the absence of energy and nutrients from the surface photosphere.

Marc Strous is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary’s Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment. He was trained at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), was a Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen and a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen (Germany). His interests cover a wide range of topics, from the oceans to the subsurface, from genomes to global climate change. Strous played a leading role in the unraveling of anammox and the successful application of this environmentally friendly technology in wastewater treatment around the world. Marc Strous co-founded Synergia Biotech, a startup company that developed the world’s first “green” blue, an environmentally friendly and healthy blue pigment for food and beverage. He teaches “Communication and Effectiveness” to graduate students, a course that focuses on presentation and writing skills, time management, career planning and everything else you need to be successful as a grad, but no-one ever told you.

Kieran C. O’Doherty is professor in the department of psychology at the University of Guelph, where he directs the Discourse, Science, Publics research Group. His research focuses on the social and ethical implications of science and technology. In this context, he has published on such topics as data governance, vaccines, human tissue biobanks, salmon genomics, and genetic testing. A particular emphasis of his research has been on the social and ethical aspects of human microbiome research. Kieran’s research also emphasizes public deliberation on science and technology. In this regard, he has designed and implemented deliberative forums in which members of the public engage in in-depth discussion about ethical aspects of science and technology and collectively develop recommendations for policy. Kieran has edited several volumes including Psychological Studies of Science and Technology (2019) and The Sage Handbook of Applied Social Psychology (2019), and he is a past editor-in-chief of Theory & Psychology. Kieran’s research has been funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Research & Innovation, Genome Canada and Genome British Columbia. He is president-elect of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology.
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Mallory Choudoir is an Assistant Professor and Soil Microbiome Extension Specialist in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at North Carolina State University. The goal of her applied research program is to translate microbiome-centered solutions that address challenges in sustainable agriculture and promote climate-resilient food systems. Her research leverages molecular sequencing, microbial ecology, and field work to explore plant-soil-microbiome interactions across diverse cropping systems in North Carolina and to quantify how microbial communities respond to environmental change and land management practices. She is a co-investigator on the Microbiome Stewardship project and an active member of the Microbes and Social Equity (MSE) group, where she contributes to broader conversations at the intersection of microbial ecology, environmental justice, and stewardship.

Alan Davidson has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1995. His research focuses on phage structure/assembly and antiphage systems.

Dr. Greg German is a Toronto based physician microbiologist focused on the translational application of bacteriophage therapy for antimicrobial-resistant and chronic bacterial infections. His work spans clinical microbiology, phage susceptibility testing, chronic urinary tract infection diagnostics, and the regulatory and implementation challenges surrounding biologic antimicrobials in Canada and internationally. He is a leader in international collaborations and Horizon Europe initiatives examining the development and clinical integration of phage-based therapeutics. He completed a PhD in Microbiology at Arizona State University on Phage Genomics and Receptors under Dr. Rajeev Misra, completed his medical degree and medical microbiology residency at the University of Ottawa. He is a Fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America and is the executive and treasurer of the ESCMID Study Group on Urinary Tract infections. He is the professor of Bacteriophage Therapy Research and Innovation at the University of Toronto and Associate Professor of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology. He is the Chair of the Global Clinical Phage Rounds and Co-founder and Clinical Director of Phage Canada. In his free time, he is a nationally certified assistant baseball coach for his two sons.

Dr. Kim Seed is an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Seed’s laboratory investigates how phages impact the evolution and selection of epidemic Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of cholera.

Dr. Laura Hug is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology whose research examines the diversity and function of microbial communities in contaminated sites. The Hug lab seeks to define microbial diversity and function at contaminated sites (primarily municipal landfills). Her lab sequences the total DNA, RNA and protein (meta-omics) of microbial communities to identify which organisms are there, and which pathways are active. She uses enrichment culturing to explore microbial community interactions and to develop new bioremediation tools. The combination of genome-enabled metabolic prediction with tracking contaminant degradation in the lab clarifies how microbes are shaping the environment.

Dr. Lisa Gieg is a Professor in Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. She earned her PhD in Environmental Microbiology at the University of Alberta then worked for several years as a researcher at the University of Oklahoma prior to joining the University of Calgary in 2008.  Lisa's research focuses on examining the roles that microorganisms play in the oil and gas industry to help improve sustainability in this sector. Specifically, her research group investigates souring and its control in subsurface reservoirs, microbial-based energy recovery, microbial corrosion of infrastructure, and bioremediation of spilled hydrocarbons and oil sands wastewater components such as naphthenic acids.

Santiago is an Associate Professor in the Evolutionary Genomics Research Program at the Center for Genomic Sciences, National Autonomous University of Mexico. His research aims to understand the phylogeography, genomic epidemiology, and microevolution of bacterial pathogens and antimicrobial drug resistance genes. His projects take a One Health perspective, where the health of animals, humans, and the environment is considered interconnected. Santiago has published 83 articles with ~ 3650 citations. He has published in flagship journals in infectious diseases (Lancet Microbe and Emerging Infectious Diseases), genomics (Genome Biology and Genome Research), and microbiology (mBio and mSystems). He is Associate Editor of Plos Neglected Tropical Diseases, Microbial Genomics and Royal Society Open Science. He is also a member of the editorial board of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Applied Environmental Microbiology, and the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
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Dr. Simon Otto (PhD University of Guelph, DVM University of Saskatchewan, BSc University of Calgary) is an Associate Professor in the University of Alberta School of Public Health and is the lead of the HEAT-AMR (Human-Environment-Animal Transdisciplinary Antimicrobial Resistance) Research Group (www.heat-amr.com). He is a veterinarian and epidemiologist whose research investigates the One Health epidemiology of AMR. HEAT-AMR focuses on integrated antimicrobial use and resistance surveillance, diagnostic testing, and stakeholder engagement using quantitative and qualitative approaches to inform and support realistic strategies for antimicrobial stewardship using a One Health approach. He is also the Thematic Area Lead for Healthy Environments in the Centre for Healthy Communities at the School of Public Health. He is a member of the Public Health Agency of Canada Expert AMR Advisory Group for the PHAC AMR Task Force and the Prairie Hub Lead of the CIHR-funded Canadian AMR Network (CAN-AMR-Net). He served as an expert panel member on the Canadian Academy of Sciences assessment of antimicrobial use and AMR in food animals in Canada. He worked for Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation as a veterinary epidemiologist before starting his faculty position and spent time in rural mixed animal veterinary practice in Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Jennifer Ronholm is an Associate Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Agricultural Microbiology at McGill University. She works in the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. She is cross-appointed to both the Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry and the Department of Animal Science. Dr. Ronholm is a leading expert in the livestock microbiome, food microbiology, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Her main goals are to find ways to eliminate the need for antibiotics on commercial farms. She aims to protect human medicine by keeping antibiotics effective.

Dr. Brian Coombes is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease and host-microbe interactions, focusing on gut health, chronic inflammatory disorders, and antibiotic drug discovery. His research combines molecular microbiology and pre-clinical models to uncover how bacterial pathogens influence disease and immunity, particularly in the gut. His lab collaborates widely with industry partners on novel therapeutics for Crohn’s disease and antibiotic resistance. Dr. Coombes is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and past recipient of numerous awards, including Canada’s Top 40 Under 40, the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Scientific Merit Award, and the Fisher Scientific Award for Career Achievement. He has published over 220 papers and abstracts and delivered 80+ invited talks worldwide.
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Roman Melnyk is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto and Program Head of Molecular Medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). His research focuses on bacterial toxins, host-pathogen interactions, and the development of toxin-inspired therapeutic delivery systems. His laboratory combines structural biology, microbiology, protein engineering, and translational approaches to study how bacterial virulence factors manipulate host cells and how these mechanisms can be repurposed for targeted intracellular delivery of therapeutics. Dr. Melnyk’s work has contributed to advances in understanding Clostridioides difficile toxin biology and the engineering of next-generation immunotoxins and protein therapeutics.

I am a molecular plant biologist aiming to understand how cells and organisms communicate with each other. My lab studies such signaling mechanisms using plant interactions with mutualistic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi as a model. Focusing on secreted peptides and their cognate receptors, we investigate the molecular signaling pathways that allow plants to perceive and transmit information about fungus presence and symbiotic quality. In addition, we study how mutualistic fungi perceive plant signals and modulate host responses. We hope that our research will lay the groundwork to engineer crops that are optimal hosts for arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, with broad implications for agricultural sustainability.

Dr. Matthew G. Bakker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. Prior to joining UM, he was a staff scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture, benefitted from post-doctoral training at Colorado State University, and earned his PhD in Plant Pathology from the University of Minnesota. The Bakker lab has a two-track research emphasis on i) soil microbial ecology, and ii) fusarium head blight disease of wheat and barley. Dr. Bakker is co-maintainer of the Canadian Collection of Agricultural Soil Microbes (CCASM), recent work with which has included sequencing the genomes of > 800 soil bacterial isolates.

Dr. Anna Simonsen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Alberta. She was previously an Assistant Professor at Florida International University in Miami USA and her lab has recently relocated to Edmonton, Canada. Her research program investigates the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that drive mutualistic associations between plants and microbes, with a focus on the symbiotic relationship between legumes and nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria (rhizobia). Her work integrates microbial ecology, evolutionary biology, plant ecology, genome evolution and biogeography to understand how mutualistic partnerships shape biodiversity, influence community assembly, and respond to environmental change. By combining field-based and experimental studies, genomic, transcriptomics, metagenomics, Dr. Simonsen’s program addresses fundamental questions about how organisms interact across scales—from molecular mechanisms to global biogeographic patterns.

Dr. Jennifer Geddes-McAlister is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Guelph. She serves as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in the Proteomics of Fungal Disease in One Health. Her work focuses on how pathogens cause sickness and how body systems defend themselves. Dr. Geddes-McAlister runs a specialized lab at the Summerlee Science Complex. Here her lab fights resistance by looking for ways to reverse drug resistance in deadly fungi to makes existing medications work again. Her lab uses advanced mass-spectrometry protein-measuring tools to study host-pathogen interactions. She also applies a One health approach to study infections across humans, plants, and animals. This includes looking at common crop diseases and human infections. Her team also researches how to engineer plants to manufacture helpful medical drugs.

Dr. Christian Landry is a full professor and researcher at Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada. He works in the Department of Biology as well as the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Bioinformatics. Dr. Landry holds the Canada Research Chair in Cellular Systems and Synthetic Biology. He leads the Landry Lab, where an international team of scientists studies how fungal cells grow, change, and adapt over time. Dr. Landry's work focuses on evolutionary systems biology and synthetic biology, that specifically examine gene duplication, fungal drug resistance, and protein evolution. He is highly recognized for his scientific discoveries, where he has published more than 100 scientific articles and won major prizes, including the 2024 Canada Gairdner Momentum Award for his impactful health research.