Nele BRUSSELAERS is Associate Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm (Sweden), where she is team leader of the epidemiology team at the Centre for Translational Microbiome Research (CTMR) and coordinator of the “Oncobiome” projects (microbiome and cancer). She also holds a fulltime Professorship at the Global Health Institute at Antwerp University, and is Guest Professor at Ghent University (both in Belgium). She completed her training as a medical doctor (2008), PhD (2010), master in infection control/hospital hygiene (2010) and first post-doc at Ghent University in Belgium; and moved to Sweden in 2012 where she lived until summer 2020 after which she moved back to Belgium. She also obtained a master in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (by distance learning, 2015).

Nele has extensive experience in clinical, cancer, microbiome and pharmaco-epidemiology by working with the Swedish nationwide health registries, several clinical (microbiome) cohorts and systematic reviews and meta-analyses, resulting in over 135 peer-reviewed articles. Nele has supervised 6 PhD students (9 ongoing) and 30 master students, and teaches on graduate and post-graduate level, mainly on study design, epidemiology, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, microbiome etc.

Although she has a broad interest and experience in different clinical topics (incl. infectious diseases) with many international collaborations; her main focus is to investigate the long-term effects of commonly prescribed drugs on female health and early childhood, cancer and diseases of the gastro-intestinal tract, through potential drug-mediated alterations of the microbiome. Her overall aim is to contribute to optimizing clinical practice and long-term health– for which trans-disciplinary approaches and collaborations are increasingly required.