Title of presentation:
Good luck or good connections? How microbial communities assemble in the subsurface
Biography:
Since 2014 Full professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and head of the Biofilm Centre.
Scientific director at the IWW, water research center in Mülheim, Germany.
2007-2014 Full professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in parallel to my institute director position at the Helmholtz Zentrum München.
2003-2014 Director of the Institute for Groundwater Ecology at the Helmholtz Center Munich, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany. The institute employed ca. 60 people working in 6 groups on aquifer ecosystem services.
2001-2003 Assistant professor for Geomicrobiology at the Chair for Environmental Mineralogy (Prof. Haderlein) and faculty member at the Center for Applied Geosciences, University of Tübingen, Germany.
1996-2000 Senior scientist at University of Konstanz, Germany in the Microbial Ecology group with Prof. Bernhard Schink. Topic of the work was anaerobic degradation of aromatic hydrocarbons with the following focus.
1993-1995 Postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology EAWAG, Dübendorf, Switzerland with Dr. Jan Roelof van der Meer. Objective of the work was to develop novel molecular tools for detection of specific microorganisms and their degradation activity in the environment.
Education:
1990-1993 PhD at the ETH-Zürich, Switzerland in the Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics with Prof. Zuber. Title of the thesis: Isolation, characterization and structural analysis of the light-harvesting B880-antenna complex of Rhodopseudomonas marina.
1985-1990 Study of biology at University of Konstanz. Master thesis at the department for Microbial Genetics with Prof. Winfried Boos. Title of the work: Characterisation of a periplasmatic maltose-inducible enzyme of Yersinia enterocolitica.
Awards:
2015 ERC-Advanced grant for studying ecosystem assembly.