Rate My Professor Melanie Blokesch

Melanie Blokesch is a Full Professor of Life Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), where she heads the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology within the Global Health Institute of the School of Life Sciences. She earned her doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) in microbiology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, in 2004. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, she joined EPFL in 2009 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016 and to Full Professor in 2021. Since 2022, she has served as Director of the Global Health Institute at EPFL.

Blokesch’s research centers on the environmental lifestyle and evolvability of pathogenic bacteria, with a primary focus on Vibrio cholerae. Her work examines regulatory networks, horizontal gene transfer, bacterial surface colonization, biofilm formation, inter-bacterial competition, secretion systems, phage and plasmid defense mechanisms, and host-pathogen interactions. She has received numerous honors, including election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2022), member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2021), member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (2019), and member of the European Academy of Microbiology (2018). Additional distinctions include an ERC Consolidator Grant (2016), an HHMI International Research Scholarship (2017), the EPFL Polysphère teaching award (2015), and an ERC Starting Grant (2012). She has also served as a Research Councillor of the Swiss National Science Foundation National Research Council since 2019.