Karen Guillemin is an American microbiologist known for her work on the role of bacteria in influencing animal development and health.
She trained with renowned microbiologist Stanley Falkow, studying how the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori interacts with gastric epithelial cells.
She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 2001, where she continued her work on H. pylori and gained widespread recognition for developing zebrafish as a model organism to study the effects of the microbiome on animal development and health.
In 2012, she co-founded the Microbial Ecology and Theory of Animals (META) Center for Host-Microbe Systems Biology.
[2] In 2015, Guillemin was named as a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Humans & the Microbiome Program.