Affiliation: University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems, Program in Microbiome Dynamics

Dr. Benedikt Mortzfeld earned his degrees from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, Germany, a hotspot for microbiome research in animal models, where he investigated the impact of host genetics on the development, the innate immune system, and microbiome resilience in phylogenetically basal animals while pursuing his doctoral research. During his postdoctoral training at UMass Dartmouth and UMass Chan Medical School Dr. Mortzfeld explores, how bacterial antimicrobial peptides can affect the ecological dynamics in the gut environment and how that knowledge can be utilized to engineer probiotic bacteria to target clinically relevant human pathogens and selectively eradicate them in vivo. He got awarded the Walter-Benjamin postdoctoral fellowship by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and currently also serves as Associate Editor for ‘Probiotics and Antimicrobial Proteins’.