Lwoff Awardee 2025 | France | Institut Pasteur | Hear from Carmen Buchrieser in our podcast

Research Interests: Bacterial pathogenesis, Legionella, Nucleomodulins

Carmen Buchrieser is currently Professor of exceptional class at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. She obtained her PhD from the University of Salzburg, Austria, conducted postdoctoral trainings at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, USA and at the Institut Pasteur, Paris France. In 2006 she was appointed Associate Professor at the Institut Pasteur, and in 2008 director of the Research Unit “Biology of Intracellular Bacteria” at the Institut Pasteur that she is heading since then.

Carmen Buchrieser’s major research interest aims to understand how bacteria cause disease, while answering fundamental biological questions: what are the genetic factors conferring bacterial virulence? how do they evolve? what are the mechanisms used by pathogens that allow subverting host functions? which host functions an intracellular pathogen manipulates to replicate and more generally how do human pathogens emerge? Her team uses Legionella as a model that is unique as these bacteria are environmental bacteria (parasite of protozoa) and human pathogens (replicating in alveolar macrophages). The biology to discover by studying host-Legionella interactions is fascinating as this bacterium is one of the best “cell biologists” or “a hidden eukaryote” that allows us to understand not only bacterial pathogenesis strategies but also to decipher host pathways that need to be subverted by a pathogen to cause disease.

USA | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Research Interests: Soil microbiology, climate change, soil viruses, permafrost thaw, multi-omics, carbon cycle

Janet Jansson is an Emeritus Chief Scientist and Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where she served from 2014-2021. Previously, she was Professor and Vice Dean at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (2003-2007), Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2007-2014) and Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley and University of Copenhagen (2012-2014).

Janet Jansson's research focuses on the impacts of perturbations, such as oil spills and climate change, on environmental microbiomes. Jansson also pioneered use of molecular microbial ecology to study the human microbiome. She made considerable advances in understanding the impact of climate change on permafrost and grassland soil microbiomes and viruses. Jansson is a Fellow of the AAM, Washington State Academy of Science and AAAS. She has >250 publications (H-Index 92) and is one of the most highly cited researchers in the world. She is Past President of ISME and serves on numerous advisory panels.

Australia | Monash University

Research Interests: Metabolism, Biochemistry, Medical Microbiology, Microbial Ecology, Biogeochemistry

Professor Chris Greening leads the CLIMB: Climate Microbiology Laboratory, an interdisciplinary team dedicated to using microbiology to understand, mitigate, and adapt to climate change. Following a first-class degree in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the University of Oxford (2010), Chris completed a doctorate at the University of Otago (2014) investigating the physiological roles of the hydrogenases in mycobacteria. He then gained postdoctoral experience at CSIRO. In 2016, he was appointed as a group leader in Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences and completed an environmentally-focused ARC DECRA Fellowship. In 2020, he moved to Monash’s Department of Microbiology to take up a medically-focused NHMRC EL2 Fellowship. He has published over 120 publications mostly in top journals and partnered extensively with large-scale intervention programs and diverse industrial organisations. In 2023, he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year.

Professor Chris Greening is dedicated to using microbiology to mitigate and adapt to climate change. This research includes the roles of microbes in greenhouse gas cycling, ecosystem function and resilience, and infectious disease transmission, and how they respond to a changing world. His research spans work at the molecular scale (e.g. structural biology, genetic manipulation) to the ecosystem scale (e.g. metagenomics, gas fluxes).

Italy |  University of Florence & Florence Careggi University Hospital

Research Interests: Antimicrobial agents, antimicrobial resistance (mechanisms, epidemiology), clinical microbiology, diagnostics 

Gian Maria Rossolini, MD, ESCMID Fellow, is Professor of Microbiology and Clinical Microbiology at the University of Florence, Italy, and director of the Clinical Microbiology and Virology Unit of Florence Careggi University Hospital. He has previously served as Professor of Microbiology and Clinical Microbiology, Chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology and Dean of the Medical Faculty at the University of Siena.

His main research interests are in the field of antimicrobial agents and microbial drug resistance. He has served as an Editor for Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and is a member of the Editorial Board of several international journals focused on Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. He has acted as reviewer/advisor on behalf of national and international funding agencies and of academic institutions for the selection of research grants and academic professorships, and as consultant of pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies in the fields of antimicrobial agents and diagnostic microbiology.