Dr. Fatima Pereira is a Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton, UK, where she leads research into host-microbiome interactions. Her research combines single-cell activity methods, molecular biology and next-generation sequencing to investigate how diet and medication shape the function of the human gut microbiome. Fatima is a microbiologist by training and obtained her doctoral degree in Molecular Biology from the NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. In 2014, she moved to the University of Vienna in Austria with a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate the mechanisms of microbiota-mediated colonisation resistance. As a senior postdoctoral fellow, she secured major funding from the Austrian Science Fund to study how the microbiome modulates gut inflammation. In recent years, Fatima has led or contributed to the development of innovative techniques to investigate phenotypes within microbiomes at single-cell resolution, with the findings published in leading scientific journals.