Elisabeth Bik is a Research Associate at the Department of Medicine, Division Infectious Diseases, at Stanford University School of Medicine. She received her PhD at Utrecht University in The Netherlands and worked at the Dutch National Institute for Health and the St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein. In 2001, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to join the laboratory of David Relman at Stanford. In the past 15 years she worked on the characterization of the human microbiome in thousands of oral, gastric, and intestinal samples. She currently works on the microbiota analysis of marine mammals and children with inflammatory bowel diseases.