Kevin Foster is recognised for bringing ecological and evolutionary principles into microbiology to understand the human microbiome and other microbial communities. His work overturned a commonly held dogma in microbiology that sets of bacterial species typically cooperate and work together. Instead, microbial communities are often competitive environments where species must compete and fight to survive. He has also shown that this natural competition can be harnessed to design communities of human gut bacteria that are protective against dangerous pathogens. In doing so, Foster has helped to change microbiome science from a largely descriptive field into one grounded in mathematics and general principles.
He studied Natural Science at Cambridge before a Ph.D. on social insects at Sheffield, which provided training in evolutionary biology, ecology and sociobiology. He has applied his ideas to a wide range of organisms but became focussed on microbes during postdocs at Rice University and Helsinki University, before starting his own lab at Harvard.
He then moved to Oxford, with positions in Biology, Biochemistry, and now at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology.
Professional position
- Chair of Microbiology, Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford
