Prof Shinichi Sunagawa has been a professor in the Department of Biology (D-BIOL) at ETH Zurich since 2016. He was born in Germany, where he studied biochemistry (diploma, 2002) and marine ecology (MSc, 2005). In 2010, he graduated from the University of California, Merced, USA, with a PhD in systems biology. He then joined the Computational Biology group headed by Prof Dr Peer Bork at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, where he initially worked as a postdoc (2010–​2011) and then as a research​ and staff scientist (2012–​2016). Prof Sunagawa leads the Microbiome Research Group, whose research interests include the study of ecological and evolutionary factors that determine the structure, function and diversity of microbial communities. The group develops and combines bioinformatic and experimental approaches in order to integrate quantitative “meta-​omics” readouts with contextual information, with the goal of better understanding and predicting the role of environmental microorganisms and the underlying mechanisms of host-​microbial homeostasis.