Paul Wilmes

Paul Wilmes is Full Professor of Systems Ecology and holds appointments at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and in the Department of Life Sciences and Medicine within the Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine of the University of Luxembourg. As a British Chevening Scholar, Paul Wilmes earned his PhD from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK) in 2006. For part of his doctoral research, he spent time as a German Academic Exchange Service Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen (Germany). He subsequently carried out postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) from where he returned in 2010 to his native Luxembourg through the ATTRACT fellowship scheme of the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). He initially established his research group at the Centre de Recherche Public – Gabriel Lippmann (now Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology) but later joined the LCSB. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Paul led the national response by the Luxembourg scientific community. A key outcome of these efforts was that Luxembourg had the lowest excess mortality due to COVID-19 in the EU plus UK. In 2019, Paul received a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. Paul is an elected executive board member of the Institut Grand-Ducal, Section des Sciences naturelles, physiques et mathématiques, and an elected member of the Académie Lorraine des Sciences. He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and has won several prizes for his scientific work. He is a frequently invited speaker at international scientific symposia and academic institutions. Paul’s research group aims at developing and applying molecular systems biology approaches to acquire new knowledge of mixed microbial communities, their interactions with their environment, and how certain microbial community compositions lead to certain outcomes. His group has developed several proprietary wet- and dry-lab technologies that enable the systematic study of microbial community-driven processes in environmental systems and in humans. In the context of the latter, his group has developed a microfluidics-based in vitro model of the human-microbial gastrointestinal interface called HuMiX. The overall objective of Paul’s research is to use high-resolution molecular data from microbial consortia to construct multi-scale models which predict and allow control of key processes governing microbial community structure and function in natura and in vivo.