Céline DELBES is a Senior Scientist at INRAE, Cheese Research group of Aurillac, France. Her research focuses around microbial ecology of the dairy food chain, in relation with cheese safety and sensory quality. Her research group has extensive expertise on traditional cheese microbial diversity, cheese technology, metagenomic, transcriptomic approaches. The objective of her work is to better understand the drivers of milk and cheese microbial communities and the interactions that govern their dynamics and functions in the cheese ecosystem. Recent work, based on metabarcoding approaches, highlighted the role of the teat skin microbiota and milk production practices, especially animal feed, in the assembly of microbial communities of milks and cheeses. To control undesirable microorganisms in cheeses, she pursues a dual approach, on one hand investigating the mechanisms involve