Meet the 2025 Peter Wildy Prize winner, Professor Lindsay Hall
25 March 2025
Each year, the Microbiology Society awards the Peter Wildy Prize for outstanding contributions to microbiology education or the communication of microbiology to the public. The Peter Wildy Prize is named after distinguished virologist and much-loved teacher Peter Wildy, who was President of the Society from 1978 to 1981.
Ahead of the Peter Wildy Prize 2025 lecture, Liam Cremona interviewed Professor Lindsay Hall to learn more about her career and how it feels to win a Microbiology Society prize.
Congratulations on winning the Peter Wildy prize this year!
Thanks so much! If I’m being honest, I was absolutely gobsmacked when I got the e-mail. It's kind of weird because even though you know you've been nominated, you never really expect to win. It means a lot that colleagues took the time to nominate me. I've done it myself from the other side, and it’s so important to put forward peers for these kinds of awards and get applications in front of prize committees. I'm very, very surprised, but also absolutely delighted!
How does this recognition reflect the work of your team in advancing microbiome research and public engagement?
This recognition highlights that you can do exciting and interesting science as a team, while also making it accessible - and I believe both are really important. That said, it's no small task to balance research and public engagement, but I really feel that as researchers, demystifying our work and inspiring the next generation of microbiologists is crucial. Hopefully this will encourage lots of students to go into microbiology and see how fascinating it is!
I think this prize is recognition that we can do cool science and can also engage the public in impactful ways. It's also a team recognition, because nearly all of our public engagement projects, especially the bigger ones, have been a collaborative, iterative effort. You'll see that we've built an incredible team of wonderful colleagues and collaborators who are passionate about sharing microbiome science, and this work simply wouldn’t be possible without them. Public engagement in microbiology truly takes a village, and this recognition is for all of us.
You've done quite a lot of work in recent years into microbiome-diet interactions, and I was particularly interested in if you could share some insights into how these interactions influence health, especially in the early stages of life and development.
This is a topic we believe is fundamentally important for understanding why microbes play such a crucial role in early life. One of their main functions is to digest components of the food we eat, but to develop effective interventions – whether for public health or clinical applications - we need to understand the mechanisms behind this process.
Studying microbiome-diet interactions in early development is important because it offers a unique opportunity to understand the role of the microbiome in a simplified system. If one of the microbiomes primary jobs is to help digest certain components of the food we eat, then how do babies survive? Well, all babies have access to milk, either breast milk, formula milk, or maybe a mix of both. They are only consuming milk, and milk provides key nutrients while also shaping the microbiome. Later in development, from around 4-6 months onwards, the introduction of solid food brings a dramatic shift in dietary composition. Disentangling the relative contribution of these different dietary elements - under a huge, complex umbrella of rapidly expanding and highly complex microbial communities - becomes far more complicated. One of the key processes in a milk-based diet, particularly with human milk, involves complex sugars known as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), which pass undigested into the baby’s large intestine. Here, specific early-life microbes use these HMOs as a dietary source, helping them grow, replicate and persist. The neat thing about this whole process is that the enzymatic machinery required to break down these complex sugars isn’t found in the baby – it’s found in certain microbes. One of the most important players is Bifidobacterium, which we consider a superhero microbe in the lab, but there are others as well. We now understand how different strains of Bifidobacterium have different enzymatic machinery, which enables them to digest different HMO profiles. It's pretty wild to take it one step back from an evolutionary perspective: mum produces milk with specific dietary components that are not directly used or absorbed by the baby but instead feed the baby’s Bifidobacterium, which in turn nourishes the baby.
This incredible microbial-host evolutionary relationship plays a key role in programming the immune system, which of course is essential in early life when babies are more susceptible to infections. Bifidobacterium is really effective at excluding potentially pathogenic or harmful bacteria in the gut and boosting immunity. More recently, we're beginning to understand that Bifidobacterium might also play a role in cognitive development. Some of the metabolic end products of HMO degradation travel to different parts of the body and may be crucial for programming various processes, including brain function and development. Another interesting aspect is microbial diversity. In most cases we talk about high microbiome diversity as generally being a good thing, however, in early life, that's not the case. We actually want low diversity because we want dominance of Bifidobacterium. That's the ideal scenario for a healthy early life microbiome.
I think the other thing that's also nice about this early life milk diet is its broader global health implications. If you analyse baby poo samples from different regions of the world, Bifidobacterium is there, though different species and strains may be dominant, likely influenced by maternal diet and milk composition. This goes back to the evolutionary nature of these relationships across populations. For us, the fun part is that get to combine fundamental research with a sprinkling of evolutionary biology. If you can figure all these interactions out, we might be able to develop next generation probiotics, which is why I love this field – it’s constantly evolving, just like the microbes we study!
You’ve introduced Bifidobacterium and its role in early development, so I was wondering how you got started in Bifidobacterium research and how has your approach evolved over time?
It’s actually a bit of a weird story! It's not necessarily what you would expect if you looked at my CV, certainly in my early years, you wouldn’t have expected me to end up where the team is now.
I trained as a microbiologist at the University of Glasgow, then did my PhD at the University of Cambridge, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where I was working on mucosal vaccines, very much focussed on pathogenic bacteria. My research was all about developing new vaccines and tackling high burden infectious diseases, particularly in the global South.
After that, I moved to University College Cork for my postdoc, shifting into hardcore immunology. I worked on inflammatory bowel diseases, looking for inhibitors to modulate chronic gut inflammation. That was the path I was heading down, until about a year into my postdoc, something unexpected happened. One day a colleague from the institute came down the corridor and said, ‘I hear that you’re a microbiologist, I've been chatting to the immunologists and I don’t understand this figure, can you help me interpret it?’.
I looked at the graph and noticed that something was potentially being modulated by, or modulating, the immune system, specifically the adaptive immune system, based on the timings of the changes. We continued chatting and then I asked, ‘Well what is it?’. They said, ‘Oh, it’s Bifidobacterium’. So, it was a spontaneous chat that changed my research direction. I got involved with that project, found it really interesting, and started thinking about microbes not just as pathogens, but as beneficial partners in human health. And that’s what ultimately led me to where I am today!
Your lab is approaching Bifidobacterium from all sides. How have you found combining wet and dry lab techniques to uncover the mechanisms underlying microbiome host interactions?
It’s definitely been an organic process. We initially focussed on individual Bifidobacterium strains and their direct interactions using in vitro and in vivo models to disentangle the mechanisms driving specific immune responses. Most likely we would have continued down this path until another chance encounter with a colleague changed things again. After starting my first lectureship and independent research group at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, I had just sat down for a cup of coffee when a neonatologist from the local Neonatal Intensive Care unit told me that they were about to start introducing Bifidobacterium probiotics and asked for my input. This was a project I would have probably done in 10 years, but I saw it as an opportunity I couldn’t refuse.
That conversation made us realise we needed to pivot, not just in research focus, but in our technical approaches. To tackle the clinical and biological challenges, we had to expand into bioinformatics much more that we had before. This meant upskilling as a team by integrating computational approaches and welcoming in computational biologists and bioinformaticians. Sometimes one side didn’t really understand the other, but because it was a growing and interactive team things worked much more effectively over time. A real advantage of this multi-disciplinary approach was having people in the lab work together to sense-check big data coming in.
We also had trainee clinicians working in the lab, who brought a broader clinical context, helping us focus on why our research mattered and where it could have a real-world impact. As I’m not a clinician, I think it’s important to have the awareness that we can all easily work in siloes which is why outreach and science communication are really important. Whether it's translating science for the public or bridging the gap between different scientific disciplines, clear communication is at the heart of everything we do.
As a well-established PI, what is your approach to mentorship and how has it changed since you started your lab in Norwich?
Mentorship is one of my favourite parts of being a PI, but it means different things to different people, so let's just clarify that first. I mentor within the team, supporting PhD students, postdocs and ECRs, but I do a lot of external mentorship. I didn’t have a formal mentor myself until relatively recently, so I’d definitely encourage others to find mentorship sooner rather than later – its incredibly value, and I was definitely late to the party! Within the team, I was very much hands-on with PhD and master’s students from an early stage, helping them create exciting projects that they could take ownership of. Previously, I would start with a specific idea of where a project might go and would mentor and support students along that journey, supporting them when new paths of investigation arose and helping them reach their goals. My aim has been to try and be there for the team, but not as a micromanager, because I think people get more enjoyment and excitement by owning their own project. Early in my PI career, I provided more detailed support, partly because I had the time and partly because I had just transitioned from being a postdoc, where I was the detail-oriented person. That mental transition - from doing, to mentoring - takes a bit of time! Over the years my approach has evolved. I still have regular one-to-ones with the team, where I give them projects with room to grow, where I don’t always have a clear idea of where it will lead. At the same time, I try to keep them on track, and ensure they get what they need for their careers, as that’s sometimes quite hard to see when you’re in the thick of research.
One thing I hadn’t fully realised at the start is that as a PI, you're almost like a small business owner; you have a team relying on you, especially postdocs, whose contracts depend on grants. People have mortgages, families, other responsibilities, and long-term career goals, and that’s something to factor into mentorship across the group. From that perspective, you keep on producing exciting work to keep the team going and bring other likeminded scientists who contribute to that environment.
Something I’ve realised a bit more recently is that ownership is key, not just of research projects, but also career development. I'm here to support team members and help them get where they want to go, but I'm also not a mind reader so I don’t know exactly what that might look like. I also try to avoid putting my own expectations on people when their goals might be completely different from mine. I try to lead through open and transparent communication, which is important from a mentorship perspective. It’s much more effective for both the individual and the team as a whole, and I really enjoy seeing people grow, develop and succeed in whatever path they choose.
How do you envision your research contributing to interventions or therapies that leverage your newer understandings of our microbiome to help promote health and mitigate disease?
We've been lucky enough to work with fantastic clinical colleagues, bringing microbiology and microbial ecology to the party. One of the most exciting aspects of our work has been demonstrating how specific strains of Bifidobacterium in fragile, premature babies can significantly reduce the incidence of serious disease. Some of our collaborative publications have even been cited in the World Health Organisation clinical care guidelines for preterm babies, which is incredibly rewarding to see. Now, we're taking this work further, particularly through partnerships across the Global South, where research is focussed on understanding how different Bifidobacterium strains from healthy babies can inform the best local interventions. Rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all approach, we’re aiming to develop microbiome-based therapies tailored for specific populations. By working with teams on the ground, we can ensure these interventions are designed by and for local communities making them more effective, sustainable, and impactful.