Prof. Dr. Rer. Nat. Habil. Michael Schloter

Michael Schloter is a microbiologist by heart. During his diploma and PhD studies at LMU Munich and the University of Bayreuth, he became fascinated by the extraordinary diversity of microorganisms and their remarkable capacity to adapt to environments once considered hostile to life.

After completing his PhD, he joined research groups in Brazil and the United States, where he identified microorganisms that support plant growth under abiotic and biotic stress and developed strategies to implement such microbiota in agricultural systems as bioinoculants. This work sparked his long-standing interest in harnessing the functional potential of microbiomes to support the health and resilience of eukaryotic hosts.

In 2001 he joined GSF – National Research Center for Environment and Health (now Helmholtz Munich), where he became a group leader in soil microbial ecology and further advanced concepts for using microbiomes to promote sustainable agriculture. After completing his habilitation in 2007, he became Honorary-Professor of Microbiology at the Technical University of Munich in 2010. In 2011 he was appointed Director of the Research Unit for Comparative Microbiome Analysis at Helmholtz Munich, where he expanded his research to multiple host–microbe systems with a particular focus on the human microbiome and its relevance for human health.

Michael Schloter is a principal investigator in the German Center for Lung Research (DZL) and the Center for Food and Nutrition (ZIEL) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM)  Munich. His research focuses on how environmental changes, biodiversity loss, and altered microbial exposures affect host-associated microbiomes and contribute to disease risks.

He has received numerous honours and was listed among the world’s top 1% most cited scientists from 2019 to 2024. In 2021 he was elected member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 2023 he holds the Chair for Environmental Microbiology at TUM. In 2025 he was appointed as member of the DFG Senate Commission on Biodiversity.

His vision is to develop strategies that harness the functional potential of microbiomes to improve human health and reduce the burden of environmentally linked diseases such as allergies and infections. To achieve this, he actively contributes to national and international initiatives advancing microbiome research and standardization, including the German One Health Platform.