Editor profiles

Cecilia has a BSc in biology from Imperial College, UK and an MSc in medical parasitology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.  She then studied the function of genes involved in malaria transmission for a PhD in molecular and cellular biology from Imperial College, UK. Having spent several years working on tropical diseases affecting developing countries, she became acutely aware of the importance of open access to peer reviewed scientific research.  In 2004, after completing her PhD she joined BioMed Central and was involved with raising awareness of open access publishing, which in those days was a novel concept. She was also involved with recruiting and maintaining relations with editorial board members across the entire BMC series of journals. She then spent several years copy-editing for non-native English speakers on a freelancing basis, before returning to BioMed Central in 2016. 

Microbial Biochemisry, Physiology and Metabolism

Stéphane Aymerich obtained his PhD in bacterial genetics in 1987. He is currently Research Director at INRA, the French National Institute for Research in Agriculture, Food and Environment, and since 2010 leads the Micalis Institute (Food and Gut Microbiology to serve Human Health) that groups 350 people in the South Paris region. 

His research interests are bacterial genetics and physiology. During the last ten years, he has focused on systems and synthetic biology. He first analyzed, up to the molecular and structural levels, different transcriptional regulatory systems in the model bacteria Bacillus subtilis. In collaboration with physiologists and mathematicians he carried on systemic analyses of its central metabolism and its adaptations to environmental changes. More recently, in collaboration with mathematicians, he has analyzed and modelled genome-wide resource allocation and the growth-rate management of protein production in B. subtilis. Today, his team develops projects of synthetic biology based on these models. 

He joined the Editorial Board of BMC Microbiology as Associate Editor in 2014 and has been serving as Section Editor since 2016.

Signaling and Cellular Microbiology 

Dr. Ralf Heermann is a microbiologist at the Biocenter of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany and Head of the Bioanalytics core facility of the LMU Biocenter, which is methodically focused on the identification and quantification of biomolecular interactions. 

He studied Biology at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, where he also received his doctoral degree (Dr. rer. nat.). Following a short postdoctoral stay in Darmstadt, Germany, he moved to Munich where he started his own research group and where he then finally received the “Habilitation”. 

His research group is interested in bacterial communication, inter-kingdom signalling and signal transduction, as well as in the regulation of bacterial phenotypic heterogeneity, especially in entomopathogenic bacteria. 

He joined the Editorial board of BMC Microbiology in 2010 as Associate Editor, and since 2015 he serves as Section Editor.

Clinical Microbiology and Vaccines

Igor Mokrousov, PhD, DSc/HDR, is Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics at St. Petersburg Pasteur Institute, Russia.

Dr. Mokrousov has co-authored 113 articles in Pubmed (H-index 30), 42 since 2012 and he holds 4 patents. He received the Scientific Prize from the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (2004), a Marie Curie fellowship (2007) and Honor Awards from the Russian Health Service. Since 2007, he has been supported by grants from the Russian Science Foundation, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the NATO Science Program, the European Commission and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

His research interests include the evolution, phylogenomics and molecular epidemiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other mycobacteria; phylogeography and co-evolution with humans; molecular basis and genotypic detection of drug resistance.

Dr. Mokrousov joined the BMC Microbiology Editorial Board initially in 2009, as Associate Editor; since 2014, he serves as Section Editor.

Microbial Genetics, Genomics and Proteomics

Hirotada Mori is Professor in the Graduate School of Biological Sciences at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.

He earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Kyoto University, Japan where he also served as an assistant professor for five years. He is the author of more than 163 articles and book chapters.

Dr. Mori’s research interests lie in the elucidation of the relationships between genes in the field of systems biology. His research career started in 1989, when the Japanese E. coli genome project launched, and since then he has been focusing on biology from a global aspect. After completion of the genome sequencing project, his research group started to construct comprehensive experimental resources, such as ORF plasmid clone libraries and single gene deletion libraries to enable systematic and comprehensive analyses for this well-studied bacterium. Using these resources, his research group commenced transcriptome analyses by DNA microarray while, in parallel, he launched projects in the proteome, metabolome and phenome fields.

Basically, his research question is “what is cell?”. And toward this end, he is currently focusing on genetic interaction by synthetic lethal/sickness analysis using double knockout strains.

He joined the Editorial Board of BMC Microbiology as Section Editor in 2014.

Microbe-Host Interactions and Microbial Pathogenicity

David Nelson is Professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Rhode Island and is also the founder and Director of the Genomics and Sequencing Center at URI.

He earned a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and carried out his postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Nelson’s research interests have included the ecology and physiology of methanogens, the physiology of Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, the developmental biology and physiology of myxobacteria, and stress responses of Borrelia burgdorferi. 

Current research interests focus on the molecular basis for pathogenicity in Vibrio anguillarum and Vibrio coralliilyticus and the molecular basis for probiotic activity in Phaeobacter inhibens and other probionts of shellfish.

He joined the Editorial Board of BMC Microbiology in 2005, became an Associate Editor in 2008, and has been serving as Section Editor since 2015.

Applied Microbiology

Marco Ventura is Professor at the University of Parma, Italy. He received his Ph.D. in natural sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, in 2003. He did postdoctoral research work at the Department of Microbiology, National University of Ireland, Cork (Ireland), before joining the faculty at the University of Parma in 2005. His research is focused on the molecular analysis of bifidobacteria as well as the diversity and host significance of the gut microbiota.

He joined the Editorial board of BMC Microbiology in 2012 as Associate Editor, and since 2017 he serves as Section Editor.

Clinical Microbiology and Vaccines

Raffaele Zarrilli is currently a Full Professor in Hygiene and Public Health at the Department of Public Health, University of Napoli Federico II, Italy. 

He received his MD and PhD degree from the University of Napoli Federico II, Italy in 1985 and 1992, respectively, and completed his residency in Microbiology and Virology in 1996.

His research interests include: molecular epidemiology of community-acquired and hospital-acquired infections caused by multidrug-resistant microorganisms; molecular analysis of antimicrobial drug resistances and mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer in Gram-negative bacteria; genomic and global epidemiology of multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. His publications (refer to PubMed and Google Scholar) have been cited over 3,100 times and he holds an h-index of 35 on Scopus. 

He joined the Editorial Board of BMC Microbiology as Associate Editor in 2012 and was instated as Section Editor in 2014.