Gabriele Micali is a junior group leader at Humanitas Research Hospital, where he leads the Microbial Ecology Lab.
After receiving Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Milan, Micali joined the group of Robert Endres at Imperial College London. There, he applied mathematical models and information theory to study how bacteria bias their movement in response to changes in nutrient concentrations, a phenomenon known as bacterial chemotaxis.
He obtained his PhD in Life Sciences from Imperial College London in 2017. In addition to his work on bacterial chemotaxis, Micali has made important theoretical contributions to the study of bacterial physiology, including stochastic models of bacterial division control.
He joined the Microbial Systems Ecology group led by Martin Ackermann at ETH Zurich and Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. In Zurich, he complemented his theoretical background with experimental approaches in molecular biology, microbial ecology, and microfluidics to study bacterial behavior at the single-cell level.
In 2022, supported by the Early Career Fellowship of the Human Technopole, Micali joined Humanitas Research Hospital and started his independent research group.
The Microbial Ecology Lab combines microbial physiology, ecology, quantitative experiments, and mathematical modeling to understand how bacterial activity shapes microbial communities and communicates with the host. The group is particularly interested in connecting single-cell bacterial behavior to ecological interactions and host-relevant processes in the gut. In 2024, Micali was awarded an FIS2 grant to study how bacterial transformations of bile acids influence gut microbial ecology and host communication.
A central aspect of the lab is mentoring young scientists in an international and interdisciplinary environment. The group brings together researchers with backgrounds in physics, biology, microbiology, and quantitative methods, with the goal of training scientists who can move across theory, experiments, and biological questions.