NATIONAL SPEAKER
A/Prof Sam Forster
Hudson Institute of Medical Research, VIC
Associate Professor Sam Forster is a microbiome researcher focused on understanding the microbial communities that live in the human body and their influence on health and disease. These microbial ecosystems, shaped daily by diet, lifestyle, and medications, remain poorly understood, yet hold enormous potential for new therapies. A/Prof Forster’s work aims to uncover their fundamental properties and develop medicines that target and enhance the microbiome.
Bringing together microbiology, immunology, and computational biology, his team develops technologies to characterise and rationally modify the microbiome. Their research spans from studying conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, and early-life disorders, to investigating how diet, antibiotics, phage, and microbial composition affect community resilience. His group also designs therapeutic strategies to restore or modulate microbiome function.
A/Prof Forster has made key contributions to microbiome science, including world-first methods to culture gut bacteria (Nature, 2016; Nature Biotechnology, 2019), novel tools to measure and model the microbiome, and innovative approaches to predict microbial function. In 2019, he established the Australian Microbiome Culture Collection, the country’s largest publicly available resource of human gut bacteria.
He works closely with industry, most notably BiomeBank, a world leader in microbiome-based therapeutics that achieved first market authorisation in 2022 in partnership with his team.