Veronika Pettersen
Veronika K. Pettersen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Medical Biology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. A microbiologist by training, she investigates how the gut microbiome shapes health and disease, with particular focus on early-life colonization, antimicrobial resistance, and pediatric cancer. Her research applies advanced omics approaches such as metaproteomics and metabolomics to uncover mechanisms of host–microbe interaction and to identify microbial and metabolic signatures with translational potential. She holds a PhD in Biotechnology from NTNU and has carried out research stays at the University of Bergen and the University of Calgary before joining UiT in 2020. In 2022, she was appointed Young CAS Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Her CAS project, Infant Gut Microbiome Acquisition: Off to a Healthy Start, examined microbiome acquisition in early life and the disruptive effects of antibiotics. Dr. Pettersen has been actively involved in several large-scale international projects, including a randomized probiotic trial in Tanzanian newborns, which used metagenomics and metabolomics to show how probiotics can promote beneficial bifidobacterial colonization, reduce antibiotic-resistant pathobionts, and reshape infant gut metabolism.