Sanne Klompe and Alan Pacheco join NCCR Microbiomes

A warm welcome to our newest NCCR Microbiomes PIs, Prof. Sanne Klompe and Prof. Alan Pacheco.

Sanne Klompe was appointed Assistant Professor at the ETH Zurich Department of Biology in July of this year.

Sanne holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Columbia University, where she demonstrated a novel method of RNA-guided DNA insertion and examined the key molecular interactions between the DNA insertion machinery and CRISPR-associated protein complexes. She pursued her research at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, and has won multiple awards for her research which focuses on genomic interactions between mobile genetic elements (e.g. viruses) and their hosts (e.g. bacteria). Sanne has a particular interest in how mobile genetic elements maintain their ability to hijack host resources while simultaneously evolving to protect themselves against defences encoded by the host.

Long-time NCCR collaborator Alan Pacheco has joined the UNIL Department of Fundamental Microbiology as an Assistant Professor on September 1st 2025.

Alan completed his Ph.D. in bioinformatics as an HHMI Gilliam and National Academies Ford fellow at Boston University, where he developed principles for designing microbial communities via metabolic interactions. He further pursued his research as a JSMF and Branco Weiss fellow at ETH Zurich, where he combined experiments with computational modeling to understand ecological interactions among plant-associated bacteria. Within the NCCR Microbiomes, Alan will study how metabolic mechanisms underlie microbiome ecology, with the goal of harnessing them to engineer communities with specific traits.