Oral Biofilms in Health and Disease

Hyun (Michel) Koo

Dr. Hyun (Michel) Koo is a Professor in the School of Dental Medicine and School of Engineering & Applied Sciences as well as the co-Director of the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He received his DDS from the Sao Paulo State University and PhD from the University of Campinas (Brazil), followed by post-doctoral training at the University of Rochester (USA) and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (USA). His research focuses on understanding how biofilms cause oral infectious diseases and seeking new therapeutic strategies by fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations. His group has employed engineering and computational imaging to study polymicrobial/interkingdom interactions within biofilms and has applied nanotechnology and robotics to develop new biofilm-targeting approaches. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Clarivate Highly-Cited Researcher, and the recipient of Distinguished Scientist and Innovation in Oral Care Awards from the International Association for Dental Research. He has served in multiple councils, review panels, and scientific committees at the National Institutes of Health and the International Association for Dental Research as well as on editorial boards of several journals.

Nick Jakubovics

Nick Jakubovics is a Professor of Oral Microbiology at Newcastle University. His research has focused on microbial biofilms since 1994, when he began a PhD on biofilms in potable water at the University of Warwick, UK. After Post-Doctoral projects on oral biofilms at the University of Bristol and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, Bethesda, MD, he established his own group at Newcastle University in 2007. His research programme explores mechanisms of adhesion and colonisation by oral bacteria and the role of the extracellular biofilm matrix. He has developed a number of promising new approaches for biofilm control. He has extensive experience as an editor, as Associate Editor for Oral Diseases and the Journal of Dental Research, and more recently as Editor-in-Chief of the JDR since 2020.

Bastiaan P. Krom

Bastiaan P. Krom completed his PhD in Molecular Microbiology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He joined the Immunology and Microbiology at Georgetown University (Washington DC, USA) for 2 years after which he returned to the Netherlands. He focused on studying fungal biofilms, first as a post-doctoral researcher and soon as Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands. In 2007 he was awarded a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Young Investigator grant. In 2011 he moved to the Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam where he was appointed as associate professor in preventive dentistry in 2012. He was appointed Professor of Oral Microbiology at ACTA in 2023. Bastiaan's department (preventive dentistry) focuses on studying the role of the oral microbiome in health and the onset of disease, where his group aims to identify the role of fungi in the healthy oral ecosystem.