Rate My Professor Ville-Petri Friman

Ville-Petri Friman is Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, a position he assumed on 1 August 2022. Previously, he was a Reader in Evolutionary Biology at the University of York from 2015, where he developed plant-microbe research systems in collaboration with international partners. Before that, he worked in Thomas Bell’s group at Imperial College London studying bacterial communities and in Angus Buckling’s group at the Universities of Oxford and Exeter, primarily investigating bacteriophages. He completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Helsinki. Currently, he holds the positions of Honorary Guest Professor at Nanjing Agricultural University in China and Honorary Fellow at the Department of Biology, University of York in the UK. Friman also serves as a supervisor for the Doctoral Programme in Food Chain and Health and the Doctoral Programme in Microbiology and Biotechnology.

Friman’s research centers on microbial ecology and evolution in human and plant microbiomes, with a focus on eco-evolutionary dynamics of species interactions in multi-trophic communities. His lab investigates how microbial interactions influence host fitness and survival in changing environments, using model systems such as the tomato rhizosphere microbiome to study bacteria-phage-plant interactions targeting the plant pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum, causative agent of bacterial wilt disease, and the cystic fibrosis lung microbiome to examine Pseudomonas aeruginosa evolution under sub-inhibitory antibiotics, co-occurring bacteria, and lytic phages. The group employs experimental evolution, environmental sampling, genome sequencing, and bioinformatic analyses to explore phage therapy applications in agriculture and medicine, antibiotic resistance evolution, pathogen virulence, and microbiome engineering. Friman has authored or co-authored 124 research outputs, including recent peer-reviewed articles such as “Harnessing phage consortia to mitigate the soil antibiotic resistome by targeting keystone taxa Streptomyces” (Microbiome, 2025), “Soil charosphere as a hotspot for antibiotic resistance genes and potential cross-trophic interactions” (Journal of Hazardous Materials, 2026), “Wood Hemicellulose-Based Spray-Dried Microencapsulation of a Lytic Bacteriophage Preserves Phage Viability” (Microbial Biotechnology, 2026), “Assembly and annotation of Solanum dulcamara and Solanum nigrum plant genomes” (G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics, 2025), and “Facilitation promotes invasions in plant-associated microbial communities” (Nature Communications, 2019).