Peter Vandamme is a professor at the Laboratory of Microbiology and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology at the Faculty of Sciences of Ghent University. His team studies basic and applied aspects of microbial diversity in human, insect, environmental and food microbiology. Peter Vandamme is also director of the BCCM/LMG Bacteria Collection, which is an ISO9001 certified Biological Resource center that acquires, controls, preserves, stores, and distributes biological material and associated information, in the frame of public deposits, safe deposits and patent deposits. Among his key technological interests are the large scale cultivation, dereplication (i.e. the selection of genetically unique strains) and identification of microbial isolates for which a high-throughput infrastructure is available.