Karoline Faust is a biologist turned bioinformatician who graduated at the Humboldt University in Berlin and earned her PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles under the supervision of Prof. van Helden. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the KU Leuven in the group of Prof. Raes. She is currently an Associate Professor, heading the group of Microbial Systems Biology at KU Leuven. Her research focusses on the development of new tools for the construction and analysis of microbial networks (CoNet, manta, anuran) as well as the investigation of microbial community dynamics in silico and in vitro. Her work is thus situated at the intersection of bioinformatics, systems biology and microbial ecology.