Markus Hilty BSc, MSc, PhD

Markus Hilty received his PhD in Epidemiology of infectious diseases from the University of Basel in 2006. Subsequently, he was a post-doctoral assistant at the Imperial College, London, from 2006-2009. During that time, he set up the methods allowing the investigation of the role of the microbiome in respiratory diseases. Since 2009, Markus Hilty is now working at the Institute for Infectious Diseases university of Bern.

He is currently a principal investigator of the microbiome laboratory within the institute. Markus’s main research focus is the molecular characterisation of microbial communities (microbiota) in health and respiratory disease. Recently, he and others simultaneously analysed the microbiota in the lower and upper airways from subjects with asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and healthy controls. In a similar study, the respiratory tract of patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD) was examined.