Professor Cecília M. Arraiano is President of the European Academy of Microbiology and Coordinating Investigator and Head of the Control of Gene Expression Laboratory at ITQB NOVA, Portugal. Her research spans molecular biology, genetics, RNA biology, microbiology and synthetic biology, focusing particularly on ribonucleases and the mechanisms controlling RNA degradation and gene expression in microorganisms. She is an elected member of EMBO and a Fellow of both the European and American Academies of Microbiology. A former President of the Portuguese Society of Genetics, she has received numerous honours for her scientific leadership and contributions to microbiology.

Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Design-driven Construction for Regenerative Architecture at KU Leuven. Her work develops interfaces between architecture and microbiology, exploring how living systems reshape design and construction practices. Through interdisciplinary partnerships, she creates social and spatial encounters with the invisible microbial realm, translating biological processes into architectural innovation. Her research builds bridges between the built environment, microbiology, biotechnology, and ecological systems with the aim to regenerate planetary health.

Pablo I. Nikel is Full Professor and Chair of Synthetic Bacterial Metabolism at DTU, Scientific Director at BRIGHT, and leader of the Systems Environmental Microbiology Group. Trained in Argentina, the United States, and Spain, he engineers non-canonical bacterial host through synthetic metabolism and systems biotechnology. His work expands microbial biochemistry for sustainable chemicals and materials. He has published over 200 articles, received awards (for instance, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation), and co-founded four biotechnology companies.

Purificación López-García is a CNRS Research Director at the Ecology, Society and Evolution unit, Université Paris-Saclay. She is interested in broad interdisciplinary questions on the ecology and evolution of microbial life. Her team combines classical, molecular and ‘omics’ approaches to investigate extant prokaryotic and eukaryotic diversity in poorly studied ecosystems, infer metabolic functions, and reconstruct early evolutionary diversification.

Nina Gunde-Cimerman is Professor of Microbiology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research explores extremophilic and extremotolerant fungi, from hypersaline and polar environments to the human-made technosphere. Her work has helped establish fungi as important models for understanding adaptation to low water activity and multiple extremes. She is an elected member of the European Academy of Microbiology and EMBO and editor of The Mycota: Extremophilic and Extremotolerant Fungi.

Víctor de Lorenzo is a Research Professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he leads the Environmental Molecular Microbiology Laboratory at the National Center for Biotechnology in Madrid. His research focuses on the biology and biotechnological potential of environmental bacteria, particularly Pseudomonas putida, for bioremediation and industrial applications. He has pioneered genetic tools for programming microbes as catalysts and now explores the interface between synthetic biology and environmental microbiology. His honours include the Rey Jaime I Award, the ASM GSK International Award and a Grand Prix from the French Academy of Sciences.

After getting a PhD in Biology (Complutense U. and CIB-CSIC, Madrid, 1991), Rafael Giraldo took up a postdoc (EMBO-LTF and MRC staff) at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK, 1992-94). Then he was hired by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) from 1995-99 at CIB-CSIC, where he later became Senior Staff Scientist (2000), Scientific Researcher (2008) and Research Professor (2010). Rafael has been at the Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC) since 2019.

Rafael is the author of 72 publications (ORCID 0000-0002-5358-7488), including the following scientific milestones:

Sophie Martin’s work has made key contributions in the fields of cell size control, cell polarization and cell fusion, using the fission yeast as fungal model. She started her lab in 2007 at the University of Lausanne. Since 2023, she is a full professor at the University of Geneva. Her work has been recognized by several awards, including the EMBO Gold medal, EMBO membership, and consecutive ERC grants.

Sarah Coulthurst is a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Microbial Interactions in the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. She established her lab in 2009 following PhD and postdoctoral positions in the George Salmond and Frank Sargent laboratories. Sarah is a molecular bacteriologist whose research interests include protein secretion systems, bacterial interactions and inter-microbial competition, and who enjoys integrating approaches from genomics through to cell biology and biochemistry.

Dr. McFall-Ngai, a staff scientist at Carnegie Science and a Faculty Associate at California Institute of Technology, has been a leader in establishing the squid-vibrio model of animal-bacterial symbioses. She is heavily involved in promoting microbiology as the cornerstone of biological sciences. She holds Honoris Causa (honorary PhD) positions at EPFL, Switzerland, University Claude Bernard, France, and University of Kiel, Germany. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), US National Academy of Sciences (2014), American Academy of Microbiology (2002), and European Academy for Microbiology (2026).

Professor Jay Hinton is Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis at the University of Liverpool and a member of the European Academy of Microbiology Steering Committee. His research investigates how bacterial pathogens cause disease, with a particular focus on Salmonella. He pioneered approaches for capturing bacterial gene expression during infection and has advanced understanding of gene regulation, non-coding RNAs and pathogen evolution. His laboratory now combines transcriptomics, functional genomics and experimental evolution to study invasive African Salmonella pathovariants. This work aims to reveal the genetic basis of bacterial disease and support the development of new antibiotics and vaccines.

Currently holding the position of Professor of exceptional class, and Head of Unit Biology of Intracellular Bacteria at the Institut Pasteur, Prof. Buchrieser has dedicated her career to unraveling the complexities of bacterial diseases. With a PhD from the University of Salzburg, Austria, and postdoctoral training in the United States and France, she has been at the forefront of research into intracellular bacteria, particularly focusing on Legionella. Her work investigates the genetic factors that confer bacterial virulence, mechanisms of pathogen evolution, and the interaction between pathogens and host functions—earning her international acclaim. Carmen Buchrieser was the recipient of the prestigious FEMS-Lwoff Award for Achievements in Microbiology 2025.

Pampa García Molina (Madrid, 1976) is a science journalist. She holds a degree in Physics from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Master’s degree in Science Journalism from the Carlos III University of Madrid. She has been working at FECYT since 2011, where she has headed the Science Media Centre Spain since March 2022. Until then, she was editor-in-chief of SINC, the first nationwide public agency specialising in science news in Spanish, licensed under a Creative Commons license. She is vice-president of the Spanish Association for Science Communication.

She has been a regular contributor to science radio programmes on RNE, Onda Cero and other stations. She delivers training in science journalism through master’s courses, workshops and seminars aimed at both journalists and the research community. Previously, she worked as a writer and editor for various media outlets in Spain, and co-authored popular science books for adults and children.

Since 1986, Pascale Cossart has investigated how bacterial pathogens interact with mammalian cells during infection. She has pioneered and documented in detail how bacteria use a multitude of complementary strategies – including posttranslational modifications, epigenetic modifications and innate immunity mechanisms – to enter into non-phagocytic cells and multiply therein, move intra-and intercellularly, and counteract the arsenal of host cell defenses. Her seminal investigations on the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes – that she has raised as a model and is one of the best studied intracellular pathogens – have paved the way for laboratories studying bacterial infectious diseases throughout the world.

Her contributions encompass infection biology, cell biology, functional genomics and fundamental microbiology, including RNA-mediated regulations. She was the recipient of the 2019 FEMS-Lwoff Award for Achievements in Microbiology, among many other prizes and awards.

Prof. Jörg Vogel is the founding director of the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) as well as the director of the Institute of Molecular Infection Biology (IMIB) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. As world-leading scientist in the field of RNA biology, Jörg Vogel is considered a pioneer in the application and development of high-throughput sequencing methods for the analysis of individual infected cells as well as interactions between pathogenic bacteria and their hosts.

Jörg Vogel was President of the EAM (2021-2024) and is an elected member of EMBO, the German National Academy of Sciences, as well as the European and American Academies of Microbiology. In 2017, he received a Leibniz Prize, Germany’s most prestigious research award, for his ground-breaking contributions to the understanding of regulatory RNA molecules in infection biology.