Paul Wilmes is Associate Professor of Systems Ecology at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine of the University of Luxembourg where he leads the Eco-Systems Biology (ESB) research group. Paul obtained his PhD from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UK; ranked first in UK according to the Research Excellence Framework) and performed part of his doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen (Germany). He was a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley before returning to his native Luxembourg through the ATTRACT Fellowship scheme of the FNR in 2010. The ESB group aims at developing and applying molecular systems biology approaches to acquire new knowledge of mixed microbial communities (e.g. gut microbiota), their interactions with their environment (e.g. the human host), and how certain microbial community compositions lead to certain outcomes (e.g. pathogenesis). The group has developed a number of proprietary wet- and dry-lab technologies that enable the systematic study of microbial community-driven processes. The overall objective is to use high-resolution molecular data from microbial consortia to construct multi-scale models which predict and allow control of key processes governing microbial community structure and function in situ.