Dr Stephan Kamrad

I am from Berlin, Germany and came to the UK to study Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. After obtaining my BA, I moved to London and obtained an MRes in 'Modelling Biological Complexity' from UCL. I then undertook a PhD in the groups of Markus Ralser and Jürg Bähler at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL where I worked on metabolic heterogeneity, high-throughput screening, yeast genetics, the systems biology of metabolism. I joined the Patil lab at the MRC Toxicology Unit in January 2022.

I am interested in how communities of microbes, such as those found in the gut, are changed by xenobiotics. We are constantly exposed to a wide range of compounds foreign to the human body, such as pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides or industrial contaminants. The gut microbiome is simultaneously affecting and affected by such chemicals, but our understanding of these complex processes is incomplete. To gain a mechanistic understanding of such interactions, I use liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry in large-scale systematic experiments supported by robotics.