Sonja Blasche studied Biology in Hamburg and Freiburg (Germany). During her PhD at the German Cancer Research Center (Heidelberg) and the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville (Maryland), Sonja assessed the pathogen-host interactions of phage lambda - E. coli and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) - human and identified the EHEC effector NleF as a potent inhibitor of human caspases. In 2014 Sonja got a fellowship that allowed her to spend 6 months in the lab of Prof. Liping Zhao at the Jiao Tong University (Shanghai, China), where she worked with the gut microbiota of obese children. Thereafter she joined the group of Prof. Kiran Patil at EMBL in Heidelberg to examine species interactions and cross feeding in microbial communities using milk kefir as a community model system and to investigate the role of gut bacteria in modulating the availability of therapeutic drugs. In 2020 Sonja moved to Cambridge together with the Patil lab where she continues her work with food fermenting microbial communities and the interaction between gut bacteria and xenobiotic compounds, drugs and antibiotics.