Dr Mireia Valles-Colomer has a background in Microbiology and Computational Biology (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain and Free University of Brussels, Belgium). After her PhD in the University of Leuven (Belgium), she joined the Computational Metagenomics Lab in the University of Trento (Italy) as an EMBO postdoctoral researcher. Next September, she will start the Microbiome Research Group at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) as a tenure-track group leader. Her research focuses on the role of the human microbiome in mental health and the transmission of the microbiome among individuals. She has developed tools to characterise the microbial production and degradation of neuroactive compounds in metagenomic data, and performed the first population-level study on the link between the gut microbiome and host anxiety and depression (Valles-Colomer et al, Nat. Microbiology 2019). The study was included in "Nature milestones 2019" as a milestone paper in human microbiota research, and was awarded a recommendation from F1000Prime. Her work on the transmission landscape of the gut and oral microbiomes was recently published (Valles-Colomer et al, Nat. Microbiology 2022; Valles-Colomer et al, Nature 2023).