Dr. Gwen Falony

Gwen Falony received his PhD in 2009 from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB, Belgium), where he studied cross-feeding interactions between bifidobacteria and colon butyrate producers. As a postdoc in the Raes Lab (VUB-KU Leuven, Belgium), he contributed to the development of bioinformatics tools facilitating functional analysis and interpretation of metagenomic data. Later on, as a staff scientist working at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB, Belgium), his work focused on defining the boundaries of a health-associated gut microbiota.

He is one of the architects of the Flemish Gut Flora Project (FGFP). He identified transit time as a main contributor to microbiota variation and described a dysbiotic microbiome configuration with high prevalence among individuals suffering from a broad range of inflammation-associated conditions. More recently, his research targets modulation of the colon microbiota away from this potentially deleterious Bact2 enterotype through dietary interventions, drug repurposing, and fecal microbiota transplantation.