Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Michael Schloter

Michael Schloter is a microbiologist by heart. Already during his diploma studies and his PhD, which he did at the LMU in Munich and the University of Bayreuth respectively, he was fascinated by the unbelievable diversity of microorganisms and their possibilities to adapt also to conditions which have been considered as hostile for life.  After finishing his PhD, he joint research groups in Brazil and US, where he identified microbes, which support plant growth under the presence of abiotic and biotic stressors and developed strategies to implement those microbiota into agricultural management as bioinocula. This concept of using the functional potential of microbiota to support the health and performance of Eukaryotes motivated him since that time and stimulated his research.

Back in Germany he got employed the GSF – National Research in 2001 where he became a group leader focusing on soil microbial ecology and further sharpened the idea of using microbiota to improve the sustainability of agriculture. In 2007 he finished his habilitation and became Professor for Microbiology at the TU Munich in 2010. In 2011 Helmholtz Munich offered him the position as a director of the Research Unit for Comparative Microbiome Analysis. Since that time he broadened his research to other microbe – host systems, with a focal point of the human microbiome and its link to human health. As a result of his research he became PI of the German Center for Lung diseases (DZL) as well as the Central for Food and Nutrition (ZIEL) at the TU Munich.

Michael Schloter received numerous honors. From 2019 – 2021 he was amongst the 1 % most cited scientists worldwide. In 2021 he became member of the Bavarian Academy of Science.

His vision is to define strategies how to improve the use of the functional potential of microbiomes associated to humans to improve our health and to reduce the burden of Environmental Diseases like allergies and infections. To do so Michael is part of national and international coordinated actions and consortia, which aim to promote microbiome research and to set standards for analysis.

MicrobiomeHost – microbe interactions ProbioticsHolobiont