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Almut Heinken is an Associate Professor at the Inserm 1256 unit (NGERE laboratory) and the University of Lorraine. She previously completed her PhD in systems biology at the University of Iceland, and a post-doc at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine. Afterwards, she worked as a Research Fellow at the National University of Ireland Galway. Her area of expertise lies in multiscale metabolic modelling of host-microbiome interactions and their role in human health. She has contributed to the development widely used resource of genome-scale reconstructions of human microbes, AGORA, and led the development of its sucessor, AGORA2, which also accounts for microbial conversion of prescription drugs.She has also developed tools to build personalized microbiome models from AGORA that allow the stratification of patients and controls according to their microbiomes’ metabolic potential, and has applied these workflows to inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and colorectal cancer. She is currently working on modeling the interactions between diet, the microbiome, and the epigenome in early-life metabolic programming.