Christian Diener, PhD

Dr. Diener is a scientist studying the interactions between microbial communities and their environment using genomic and experimental strategies. He is mainly studying the gut microbiota – the community of bacteria living in our gut – and its impact on our health. For that, he uses a variety of computational strategies revolving around statistics and mechanistic models to identify potential connections between the microbiome and host health, and validates them in the wet lab.

Dr. Diener was originally trained in Computational Biology during his Bachelors degree at the Free University in Berlin and transitioned to Systems Biology during his Ph.D. studies at the International Max Planck Research School for Computational Biology and Scientific Computing where he worked on signaling pathways in yeast communities. He became interested in the areas of microbial communities and human health and dove deeper into these topics in his subsequent positions. In his first postdoctoral fellowship, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he designed multifunctional antimicrobial peptides, and in his second postdoc at the National Institute for Genomic Medicine, also in Mexico, he studied metabolic alterations in human cancers and the microbiome in type 2 diabetes. This ignited his passion for metagenomics and molecular ecology as an interface between microbes and human health and led to his time at ISB as a postdoc, a research scientist, and finally a senior research scientist. He went on to be appointed an Assistant Professor at the Medical University of Graz, in Austria.