Two CMFI researchers honoured with prestigious DGHM Awards 2025

At the 77th Annual Meeting of the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology (DGHM) on 22 September 2025 in Jena, CMFI board member Lisa Maier was awarded the DGHM Grand Prize for her outstanding contributions to microbiome research. The jury justified its decision with Lisa Maier's groundbreaking and internationally renowned work in the field of microbiome research, with a particular focus on functional interactions between drugs and the gut microbiome, successfully combining microbiology, systems biology and computer-assisted analysis. In summary, she is distinguished by a long-term, internationally networked research career that combines active science with science management, third-party funding acquisition, teaching, promotion of young talent, interdisciplinary research approaches and active science communication.

At the same time, Anne Grießhammer received one of the DGHM doctoral awards for her dissertation, completed with summa cum laude, entitled ‘Impact of drug-microbiome interactions on the intestinal colonisation with pathogenic Gammaproteobacteria’. Anne Grießhammer is an alumna of the Maier research group. The doctoral award is sponsored by the German Centre for Infection Research (DZIF).
Her results were published in Nature, with her as the lead author. At the same time, she developed various high-throughput assays to analyse the effect of non-antibiotic drugs and environmental chemicals on anaerobic intestinal bacteria in vitro. This work was published in the journals Science and Nature Communications. Another paper has been accepted by Nature Microbiology and a fourth is currently under review by Nature Microbiology.

To the detailed reasoning of the jury