Ruben Mars obtained his Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2014, where he worked on gene regulation in Gram-positive bacteria.

He moved on to a postdoc at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he used innovative untargeted metabolomics approaches to unravel microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions. Towards the end of his tenure in Zurich, Ruben started consulting for multiple companies in the microbiome therapeutics space, including the Human Microbiome Institute of Johnson & Johnson. He then helped Medipredict, a consumer-focused personalized medicine startup from Budapest, Hungary, to develop their microbiome and metabolomics measurement and data interpretation pipeline.

In 2019, Ruben moved to the US and worked on multi-omics integration for a series of human microbiome projects at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.