Nicole Dubilier

Her father was an american businessman and her mother was a german immigrant descendant of the physician and electrophysiology pioneer Emil du Bois-Reymond and Fanny Mendelssohn a renowned pianist and composer.

At a young age, Nicole Dubilier's first aspirations ventured into the artistic realm of classical ballet. In 1970 Stuttgart Ballet accepted her to train with John Cranko (Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany). However, she decided to stay in Wiesbaden (Hessen, Germany) with her mother and three siblings. During her primary education, basic science did not feature on her repertoire of interests,[5] yet her visits to the Fire Island (Long Island, New York) and an internship at the marine station on Helgoland (Germany) carved her prospective in Marine Biology. [6][7][8]

In 1985, Dubilier obtained her degree in Zoology, Biochemistry and Microbiology and completed her Ph.D. in Marine Biology at the University Hamburg with Olav Giere in 1992. During her graduate studies, she found herself dispassionate about her research, often wanting to quit, but her persistence propelled her to the finishline. In 1992, motivated to re-discover the excitement of her field, Dubilier attended a molecular biology summer course taught by Donald Manahan at University of Southern California. [5] [6] Later, from 1993-1995, she experienced her first Post-doc with the guidance of Colleen Cavanaugh on hydrothermal vents chemosynthetic life forms. Two years later, she started her career at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (MPI-MM), first as a Postdoc studying the Evolution of bacterial symbiosis in gutless worms (1997-2001) and afterwards as the Coordinator of the MPI-MM International Research Program (2002-2017), Head of the Symbiosis Laboratory (2001-2017) and the Head of the Symbiosis Department (since 2013).[1][5][9]. Dubilier has continued her work on symbiotic relationships within chemosynthetic living organisms, expanding her exploration of both shallow and deep-sea environments, ranging from seagrass to coastal sediments, through meta-omic approaches, e.g. metaproteomics and metagenomics. Her primary animal models constitute of shrimp, gutless-worms, nematodes, and ciliates.[10]

2017 Co-Chair American Society Microbiology Microbe Conference.[11][12]

2014 German Research Foundation Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize. [12]

Since 2013 Elected member at the American Academy of Microbiology.[10]

2013 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Marine Microbiology Initiative Award.[13]

2009 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) Applied and Environmental Microbiology chapter.[14][7]

• McFall-Ngai M., Hadfield M.G., Bosch T.C.G., Carey H.V., Domazet-Lošo T., Douglas A.D., Dubilier N., Eberl G., Fukami T., Gilbert S.F., Hentschel U., King N., Kjelleberg S., Knoll A.H., Kremer N., Mazmanian S.K., Metcalf J.L., Nealson K., Pierce N.E., Rawls J.F., Reid A., Ruby E.G., Rumpho M., Sanders JG., Tautz D., and Wernegreen J.J. (February 26, 2013). "Animals in a bacterial world, a new imperative for the life sciences". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (9), 3229-3236; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1218525110
• Dubilier N., Bergin C, Lott C.(October 6, 2008)"Symbiotic diversity in marine animals: the art of harnessing chemosynthesis".Nature Reviews in Microbiology 6 (10):725-40; https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1992.
• Woyke T., Teeling H., Ivanova N.N., Huntemann M., Richter M., Gloeckner F.O., Boffelli D., Anderson I.J., Barry K.W., Shapiro H.J., Szeto E., Kyrpides N.C., Mussmann M., Amann R., Bergin C., Ruehland C., Rubin E.M., Dubilier N.(October 26, 2006). "Symbiosis insights through metagenomic analysis of a microbial consortium". Nature 443 (7114), 950; https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05192
• Dubilier N., Mülders C., Ferdelman T., de Beer D., Pernthaler A., Klein M., Wagner M., Erséus C., Thiermann F., Krieger J., Giere O. and Amann R. (May 17, 2001). "Endosymbiotic sulfate-reducing and sulphide-oxidizing bacteria in an oligochaete worm". Nature 411 (6835), 298; https://doi.org/10.1038/35077067