Associate Professor Marloes Dekker Nitert is a teaching and research academic at The University of Queensland. Marloes is a biomedical researcher with a PhD from Lund University in Sweden. Her research focuses on the role of metabolism in complications of pregnancy. She currently heads a laboratory research group at UQ studying the role of the gut microbiome in pregnancy, the role of food additives on placental function and placental gene expression and epigenetic markers in pregnancy complications. Marloes works closely together with clinician-scientists and clinicians at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. She is part of the SPRING RCT team, which assesses if probiotics can prevent gestational diabetes mellitus in overweight and obese women.