Dr Zuzanna Karwowska has over seven years of experience researching the gut microbiota and its impact on human health. She is a PhD scholar in computational biology (Malopolska Center of Biotechnology, Krakow Poland), where she developed computational methods to better understand gut microbiome dynamics.
She worked at multiple research centres worldwide, including EMBL Heidelberg, the Centre for Bioinformatics in Bordeaux, and the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb, as well as in R&D at two gut-microbiome-focused start-ups developing microbiome-based drugs. She is currently a senior scientist at a company in Cambridge, UK.
Zuzanna believes that education about gut health should be a compulsory part of the school curriculum, and since it isn’t (yet), she decided to help fill that gap. Alongside her scientific work, Zuzanna promotes evidence-based knowledge on social media through her @feeling_gut Instagram account, where she translates current research on the gut microbiome into accessible language and shares plant-based recipes.
We usually think of bacteria as enemies. Something to kill, avoid, or disinfect. But inside your body lives an entire ecosystem of trillions of bacteria that quietly shape your health every day. In this talk, Zuzanna shows how the gut microbiome influences digestion, immunity, metabolism, mood, and even hunger — and how the modern Western diet is slowly starving these microbes.
You’ll learn why fibre matters more than you think, how “healthy” ultra-processed foods can backfire, when probiotics help (and when they don’t), and what happens when the microbiome is pushed so far out of balance that more radical solutions like fecal transplants are needed. The message is simple: if you want your body to work for you, you have to start by taking care of the microscopic community living inside you.
TEDxAberystwyth 