Fatima Pereira is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Her research combines single-cell activity methods, microspectroscopy, molecular biology and next-generation sequencing to investigate how diet and medication shape the function of the gut microbiome. Fatima obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology from the NOVA University of Lisbon in Portugal, where she investigated the molecular bases of pathogenesis of the gut pathogen Clostridioides difficile. This motivated her to better understand how resident microbes modulate resistance to infection, and she then moved to the University of Vienna, Austria, with a Marie-SkLodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate mechanisms of microbiota-mediated colonisation resistance. As a Senior Postdoctoral fellow, Fatima secured major funding from the Austrian Science Fund and the Portuguese Research Agency to investigate the mechanisms through which the microbiomes of mammals and other vertebrates modulate gut inflammation, nutrition, and growth. In August 2022 she moved to the University Southampton, UK, where she established her research group.