Coen Berns is a PhD candidate at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam. His work involves the development of computational metabolic models of the infant gut and oral microbiome. The research focuses on understanding how diet, microbial community changes, and microbial interactions within the community influence long-term health outcomes in infants. Coen integrates data from in vitro– and cohort studies to simulate microbial metabolism and hopes to predict which interactions within the community, and which nutrient environments from the diet, stimulate the production of healthy, gut-promoting metabolites (such as butyrate) during early life.
Coen holds an MSc in Nanobiology from Delft University of Technology and Erasmus MC. He gained expertise in computational biology and bioinformatics modeling neuronal asymmetry in an in-silico mouse brain and developing an algorithm for the detection of hypermutated regions in WGS cancer patients. During his MSc thesis at the Traverso Lab at MIT/Harvard Medical, he worked on optimizing an ingestible biomedical device for gastric electrophysiology, and the development of a pipeline linking gastric electrophysiology and behavior in vivo.
