Prof. Dr Hauke Smidt(1967) studied Biotechnology at the Technical University of Braunschweig, University of Kyoto, Japan, and University of Stuttgart, Germany. He received his PhD in 2001 at Wageningen University and has worked as a postdoc with Prof. Dave Stahl at the University of Washington, Seattle, focusing on the development of DNA arrays for microbial community analyses. Hauke Smidt heads the Microbial Ecology Group at the Laboratory of Microbiology, Wageningen University & Research, that focuses on the integrated application of innovative cultivation and functional genomics-based methods to study composition and activity of microbial communities. Key areas of interest are addressed within national and international multi-investigator consortia and include i) Microbiota associated with the intestinal tract in humans, production animals and wildlife ii) Microbial communities in environmental biotechnology, and iii) Microbes and their cellular biomarkers as proxies for ecosystem life history & environmental change. In this context, research in the Smidt group increasingly follows a OneHealth philosophy that links environmental, human and animal health, including but not limited to the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria and their genes.

Hauke Smidt has been member of the Management Team of the National BE-Basic program, and Senior Scientist and Theme Council member at TI Food & Nutrition. Hauke Smidt currently supervises approximately 20 PhD students in national and EU projects. He has (co-)authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications, with an ISI WoS H-factor of currently 60. He is (co-)inventor of several patents, and he is senior editor of ISME Journal, Microbiome and Animal Microbiome. In 2008, Hauke Smidt has been appointed Visiting Professor at Nanjing Agricultural University, and since 2010, he holds a Personal Chair in “Complex Microbial Ecosystems” at Wageningen University.