EnvGen

Anders Andersson (PI)

Anders received his PhD in 2005 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology after graduate studies on functional genomics on Archaea. Thereafter he conducted postdoctoral studies at the Karolinska Institute, University of California Berkeley, and Uppsala University, working on metagenomics approaches to study microbial communities of different environments (the human gut microbiota, biofilms of acid mine drainage, and bacterioplankton of lakes and the Baltic Sea). In 2010 he returned to KTH, starting his tenure track and building up the Environmental Genomics group at Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm. In 2022 he was promoted to professor.

Krzysztof T. Jurdzinski (PhD student)

Krzysztof is interested in how evolution and ecology shape microbial genomes, diversity and functioning. Using tools of data analysis, phylogenomics and bioinformatics he wants to connect genomic changes to physiology and role in ecosystem functioning of the microbes. He has a background in biochemistry (BSc, Jagiellionian University) and finished SciLifeLab Master’s programme in Molecular Techniques in Life Science (joined between Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University and KTH).

He joined ENVGEN first as a summer intern (2021), then for a short research project (2021-2022) and his Master’s thesis (2022). Starting from 2022, he is a PhD student in a project focused on evolution of brackish microbiome. He also studies adaptation and dispersal of bacterial in a broader context, as well as factors driving microbial diversity.

Meike Latz (Postdoc)

Meike has a background in molecular/microbiology from RWTH Aachen (DE) and University of Exeter (UK). She received her PhD in microbiology from the University of Copenhagen (DK) in June 2019, where she investigated plant-associated fungi using metabarcoding and transcriptomics. Her general research interest lies in microbe – environment interactions, how environmental factors influence microbial community abundance, composition, and functions in the environment.

Since September 2019, as a postdoctoral fellow at SciLifeLab and KTH, Meike develops molecular and bioinformatic methods to advance metabarcoding for higher taxonomic coverage and resolution. She applies these methods for environmental monitoring of plankton in the Baltic sea, with a special focus on non-indigenous species and harmful algae. This project - DNA-metabarcoding of marine phytoplankton - is a collaboration with Umeå University and SMHI.

Ela Iwaszkiewicz (Postdoc)

Ela is an evolutionary geneticist interested in uncovering and understanding the diversity of life. She received her PhD in 2018 at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Germany. In her PhD research Ela used transcriptomics to observe how hybridization facilitated rapid local adaptation and speciation in fish.

Currently she's a postdoctoral researcher within the Insect Biome Atlas (IBA), where she's developing and implementing a metabarcoding approach to describe insect fauna of Sweden. Ela is sharing her time between the Natural History Museum, Piotr Lukasik's lab at Jagiellonian University and SciLifeLab.

Maria Prager (Research Engineer)

Maria completed a PhD in animal ecology in 2010, at the University of Gothenburg. She explored the evolutionary origins of biodiversity, focusing on sexually selected signal traits, such as bright carotenoid coloration and elongated tails in birds. Specifically, Maria combined reflectance colorimetry, liquid chromatography (HPLC) and molecular systematics to test phylogenetic, mechanistic and ontogenetic explanations of evolutionary divergence in the African widowbirds and bishops (Euplectes spp.).

Maria is a research engineer at the Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences (DEEP), at Stockholm University, and joined the Environmental Genomics group at Scilifelab in 2018. Together with Anders and collaborators at Uppsala and Linnaeus University, she works with mobilizing metabarcoding and metagenomics data into Biodiversity Atlas Sweden, now part of the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI).

Luis Fernando Delgado (PhD student)

Fernando has a background in chemical/process and environmental engineering. He received a PhD in 2009 at INP Toulouse and conducted postdoctoral studies at Claude Bernard University, CIRSEE (Suez's Research and Expertise Centre), and INSA-Lyon.

Recently, he completed his master's in bioinformatics at Lund University. Fernando joined ENVGEN in 2019 and is currently doing a PhD in Biotechnology, with focus on bioinformatics and machine-learning for microbiome analysis. In particular, as part of the EU-project BaltVib, he conducts comparative genomics on a large collection of isolates of pathogenic Vibrio bacteria (Vibrio vulnificus) isolated from different regions of the Baltic Sea..

Emma Bell (Postdoc)

Emma’s research explores the microbiome of natural and engineered ecosystems. She integrates meta-omics with geochemistry to understand how microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, and viruses) interact with each other and the environment. After completing her PhD in 2016 at Newcastle University, UK, she has carried out postdoctoral research at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and the University of Calgary, Canada. She has investigated the microbiome across a range of ecosystems, linked together by the overarching themes of biogeochemical cycles, microbial ecophysiology, and live in extreme environments.

In 2022, Emma was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship to join the Environmental Genomics group at SciLifeLab. Here she researches bacteria- phage interactions and dynamics in the Baltic Sea using meta-omics approaches.