Bärbel Stecher has received her PhD in Microbiology from the ETH Zürich (Switzerland) in 2005. After a postdoctoral period at ETH, she moved as an EMBO Short-Term Fellow to McMaster University (Canada) in 2007, working on the implementation of gnotobiotic mouse models in preclinical infection research. In 2011, she was appointed assistant professor (associate professor in 2016) at the Department of Medicine, LMU Munich (Germany) where she is leading a research team consisting of scientists and students in biology and human medicine. She has made important contributions to our current understanding of the interplay between enteric pathogens and the intestinal microbiota and published 81 papers in peer-reviewed journals. In 2019, she received an ERC consolidator grant. Bärbel Stecher is deputy speaker of the DFG-funded research consortium CRC1371 and coordinator of the TTU Gastrointestinal Infections of the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF).
Her research focus is the function of the microbial ecosystem in the gut in preventing enteric infections. Her group combines classical microbiology (i.e. isolation of gut bacteria) with gnotobiotic mouse models and next generation microbiome analysis to understand microbial interactions with human enteric pathogens.