18 December 2024 – Ines Thiele’s career path has taken her from Germany to the United States, Iceland, Luxembourg, and now Ireland. The EMBO Young Investigator Network was crucial in solidifying Thiele’s position within her research on human health and medicine. One of the most valuable aspects of the EMBO experience for her Ines was the targeted soft skills training. “Getting these courses was a brilliant experience,” she recalls. “Generally, scientists are not educated in management, people management or grant management – all these skills that you need to have a larger team.”
For Thiele, a principal investigator and two-time ERC grant recipient, curiosity is the driving force behind her research. “Curiosity and pushing the boundaries,” she states when asked about her motivation. Her work focuses on creating computational models of human metabolism and its association with the gut microbiome, aiming to understand better how nutrition and medication influence human health.
“It’s about incorporating the genomics with these models,” she explains. “So far we can integrate metagenomics, we can integrate nutrition and metabolomics, but these kinds of models never allowed for the integration of a person’s genome. This innovative approach could improve our understanding of inherited metabolic diseases and Alzheimer’s disease.”
