On August 29th, 2024, Steff Taelman successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis "Beyond Correlations: A Causal Perspective on Host-Microbiome Interactions" and was awarded the title of Doctor of Bioscience Engineering: Bioinformatics. Steff performed his industrial doctoral research in a joint venture with BioLizard supported by a VLAIO grant and was supervised by Wim Van Criekinge, Michiel Stock and Liesbeth Ceelen.