“Having a career in academia is the coolest thing ever”

Camille Goemans, Tenure Track Assistant Professor and head of the Lab of Drug-Microbiota Interactions at EPFL, studies how antibiotics affect microbes, how bacteria develop resistance, and how they share resistance elements within gut communities. She combines molecular and systems microbiology with a keen interest in finding new treatments or making existing ones effective again.

What do you research?

I am interested in antibiotics and their effect on diverse bacteria. We know quite well how they work on some bacterial models or common pathogens, but we don’t really know how they affect more diverse species, particularly the bacteria that live in our gut—the human gut microbes.

We’re studying the impact of known antibiotics on gut bacteria, how they become resistant to antibiotics, and how they share resistance elements within gut communities. And as we are entering the antibiotic resistance crisis where some antibiotics do not work anymore, we are trying to find ways to design new treatments or to make treatments work again.

What led you to this field? How did your interest begin?

I didn’t initially have a very strong interest in this particular field. I ended up a bit randomly in a microbiology lab for my bachelor’s thesis, and realized that bacteria are super interesting. I discovered the whole microbiology world and was very much drawn to it. So I stayed for my master’s and PhD theses in the same lab, doing microbiology.

What fascinates you about your topic?

What fascinates me is how little we know about these bacteria. When I started in microbiology, nobody was talking about the microbiota. Now, over the last ten years, we hear about it more and more. The same goes for antibiotics—we knew there was an antibiotic resistance problem, and now it’s becoming a bigger issue, but it’s still very interesting how little we know.

On the other hand, it’s really the fundamental aspect of it: how different these bacteria are. They can survive any kind of environment. Understanding how this works at the molecular level fascinates me.

What challenges do you encounter?

Working with antibiotics is tricky. Trying to find ways to delay antibiotic resistance or work against this crisis is difficult because resistance will always emerge, so it’s kind of a never-ending fight. That’s a challenge at the subject level.

I think having a career in academia is the coolest thing ever, and I feel very lucky that it worked out for me to get this. But, as we know, you have to deal with many things in parallel. Depending on your personality you can be stressed or not, but it’s quite intense in general.

If you want to have a family on top of this, it can be very challenging because you need to travel, you need to change countries —and if you have a partner, it makes it difficult for them career-wise. If you have kids, in Switzerland, it’s very difficult to combine everything. It’s somehow possible, I have 3 kids, but it requires a lot of energy and support.

What do you teach at EPFL?

I’m teaching two different classes. One of them is Molecular and Cellular Biology I, which happens in the first semester of the second-year bachelor. I started this semester and it’s about 200 students. The second one is something I share with three other professors; it’s the General Biology for the first-year bachelor students. So I’m really teaching early on in the curriculum, first and second year, with big groups.

What do you enjoy about it?

It’s the first time most of the students encounter biology, especially because here they have a lot of physics and math in the beginning. So they’re super happy to finally hear about biology—it’s what they chose in a way. And it’s very easy to make them curious because it’s about understanding the real basics of biology and molecular biology.

What would you like to change?

Last year I was talking to students as part of the EPFL mental health task force, and I realized how stressful it can be for them and how there is sometimes a diconnect between students and professors. We all stress in our own small bubbles and don’t always realize that others are also stressed.

So now, in my class, I try to be really open with the students—ask them if I’m going too fast or too slow, if they can follow the exercises—and encourage feedback. I think there might be ways to improve the exchange between professors and students so that we feel we’re all part of the same group. It’s not like ‘professors against students’ or some kind of dynamic that would be deleterious to everybody. I try to have this open discussion with students as much as possible.

Tell us something interesting about yourself.

Before starting research, and while doing research, I was a dancer at a semi-professional level. I was also a dance teacher for about 10 years—from 16 to 26. So I kind of always liked to teach, but of course it’s very different to teaching biology! This was always very important for me. During my PhD, or at least before I had my first kid, I was dancing between 10 and 15 hours per week, and then of course I had to at some point reduce it.

Watch Camille Goemans' inaugural lecture: The impact of antibiotics on human gut microbes