Slack has been hailed as "Die Mikroben-Versteherin" (the microbe expert) by the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. In fact, the ETH professor is also a leader in food immunology. Along with her team, she developed a new oral vaccination that can reduce the use of antibiotics in animals and at the same time eliminate the problem of antibiotic resistance. The vaccination is intended to protect pigs from potentially dangerous pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella.
Slack’s research is also expected to benefit humans. She is investigating how the consortia of microbes that live in our gut affect our immune system and how nutrition, microbiota, the metabolism and immunity interact to affect our health. It has been proven that gut bacteria play an important role in depression, for example.