Alumni

Khawla was born in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She studied medical laboratory sciences in Palestine at the Arab American University, and then she got her Master degree in Diagnostic molecular biology and human genetics in Jordan. Khawla did her PhD in the evolutionary genetics department under the supervision of Dr Linda Odenthal-Hesse at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology. Her thesis was focused on understanding Hybrid Sterility during meiosis, using the house mouse as a model for her research. Khawla defended her thesis in 2020 and wrapped up her work at the MPI. Since 2022 she is a postdoc at the CMMC, Uniklinik Köln, Germany.

Jatin was born in Punjab, India. He was trained as a computer engineer in his bachelor study in India in 2010. However, he later turned to genetics with a master in Bioinformatics from University Pierre and Marie Curie (Sorbonne) in Paris in 2014. He earned his PhD in the lab of Dr. Tobias Lenz at the Max Planck Institute Plön. His thesis work focused on elucidating the antigen repertoires of Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) molecules in infectious and autoimmune diseases. He defended his thesis in early 2019, and then moved to Harvard Medical School / Broad Institute for a postdoc.

Contact: jarora1@bwh.harvard.edu

Hiba was born in Khartoum, Sudan, and studied Molecular Biology at UAE University, United Arab Emirates, and at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she received her M.Sc. Biology in 2010. Between 2010 and 2014 she did her PhD within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology on "Mus musculus helgolandicus: insights into their origin - A study based on genetic and morphometrics analysis" in the Evolutionary Genetics group at the MPI Plön. Hiba is now doing her postdoc at the MPI for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

Contact: babiker@shh.mpg.de

Coming from Barcelona, Maria started on the lab bench during her degree in Human Biology, but now computers have become her hands for doing science. During her masters, Maria got experience in modelling biological processes in the fields of cognitive science and synthetic biology, and decided to become a theoretical biologist. Maria pursued her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Chaitanya Gokhale in the Evolutionary Theory department. Her project aimed to integrate eco-evolutionary dynamics in agriculture, to design novel strategies for crop rotations. Maria defended her thesis in 2020. In 2021, she joined the Infectious Deseases Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Contact: mb2464@cam.ac.uk

Gustavo was born in Brazil, where he received my Bsc. in Biology from the Regional University of Blumenau and then his Msc. in Genetics and Evolution from the University of São Paulo. Gustavo joined the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in 2015 as an intern in Julien Dutheil’s group and in 2016, he started his PhD on Population Genomics developing a model to account for spatial heterogeneity of parameters in the coalescent process. He defended his thesis in 2019. From October 2019 until April 2022 he was a postdoc at the University of California Los Angeles under the supervision of Kirk Lohmueller. Currently, he is a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin with Aaron Ragsdale.

Contact: valadaresbar@wisc.edu

Joana was born in Lisboa, Portugal, where she did her Bachelor and Master in Evolutionary Biology and Development in 2011. During her studies, she was able to do her thesis in IBL, in Leiden, Netherlands.
She did her PhD in ‘Yeast Heterosis’ under the supervision of Dr. Duncan Greig, from the Experimental Evolution Group, in the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology.
Joana defended her thesis in 2018 and is currently working as a postdoc at the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology in Kiel.
Contact: j.pimentabernardes@ikmb.uni-kiel.de

Devika's birthplace is Pune, India, where she also completed her bachelors in Microbiology at Fergusson College, Pune University (2012). Her masters was also in Microbiology in the MS University of Baroda, Gujarat, India (2014). During her masters she developed interest in evolutionary biology and hence she joined an evolutionary biology lab in the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India. She worked at the Institute as a project fellow for a year (2015). She worked with Prof. Dr. Diethard Tautz at the MPI in Plön as an IMPRS student. Her project dealt with de-novo gene evolution in prokaryotic systems (mostly bacteria).
Devika defended her thesis in September 2020 and continued her work in the Tautz lab until the end of 2021. Currently, Devika is working in a Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Contact: Devika.Bhave@childrens.harvard.edu more

Joanna was born and raised in Poland. After her BSc degree in human biology at the University of Wrocław in 2016 she studied forensic anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she graduated with a MScR degree in 2018. Wishing to study human remains at a different (molecular) level, Joanna conducted her doctoral research from 2019 until the end of 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Almut Nebel at the ancient DNA research group at the CAU in Kiel, where she concentrated on the question to what extent the pathogen-driven selection events in the past affected the frequency of genetic disease factors in the present day. Joanna’s academic interests include paleoanthropology, paleopathology, forensic anthropology and primatology. Currently, she is holding a postdoc position in the Almut Nebel group at the UKSH in Kiel.

Contact: j.bonczarowska@ikmb.uni-kiel.de
 

Ozan was born in Turkey and studied at the Ege University and the Izmir Institute of Technology, where he received his M.Sc. in Molecular Biology and Genetics in 2009. He continued working there as a Research Assistant until he started his PhD within our IMPRS in 2011 working in the Max Planck Research Group for Experimental Evolution with Dr. Duncan Greig. Ozan moved to the USA where he is currently doing his postdoc in the lab of Will Ratcliff at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Contact: bozdag@evolbio.mpg.de

Juryung was born in California, USA, and raised in Korea. After having earned her B.Sc in Animal Science at UC Davis, California, USA, in 2011, she did her masters in behavioral ecology at Seoul National University, Korea, assessing and studying various effects of a pesticide on toad tadpoles.
Juryung worked in the molecular ecology group at Yeungnam University, Korea, until she joined the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology for her PhD in 2017. Her research was supervised by Prof. Dr. John Baines of the Evolutionary Genomics group where she focused on host-microbiome interaction and variation in mouse lung, establishing the concept of lung microbiota by examining the role of host genetic variation. Following her dissertation in June 2021, she is currently wrapping up her work as postdoc in the Baines group.

Contact: cjchung@evolbio.mpg.de
 

Originally from the Netherlands she has lived in the UK since she was little. She read Zoology at the University of Sheffield, completing both her bachelor’s and master’s there in 2014.
In January 2017, she joined the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön as a doctoral student under the supervision of Dr Miriam Liedvogel. Her project aimed to shed light on the molecular underpinnings of migratory traits in the blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla.
She took up a position outside academia in Cambridge, UK, in August 2021.

Contact: gdurieux@evolbio.mpg.de
 

Christoph was born in Hanau, Germany and received his Master Degree in "Molecular and Cellular Biology" at the Philipps University Marburg in 2014.
Since summer 2014, he was working as a PhD student in the group "Environmental Genomics"  at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, supervised by Prof. Dr. Eva Stukenbrock and was an associated member of the IMPRS.
His PhD project is about the evolutionary genomics and functional characterization of the fungal grass pathogen Zymoseptoria brevis and the other members of the Zymoseptoria species complex.
Christoph defended his thesis in 2019 and is currently wrapping up his work.

Contact: ceschenbrenner@bot.uni-kiel.de

Johana was born in Bogotá, Colombia. After her studies at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, where she received her B.Sc. in Biology with emphases in biochemistry and molecular biology, Johana joined the Evolutionary Immunology and Immunogenetics research group at the National University of Colombia, finishing with her Master’s degree in 2014.
From January 2017 until December 2021 Johana persued her PhD at the Evolutionary Genetics group under the direction of Prof. Dr. Diethard Tautz. With her project she aimed to get a better understanding of the mechanisms of evolution of de novo genes using an eukaryote system.
In between her studies, she has worked in different areas of the private and public sector.
Johana has a position in the Bosch lab at Kiel University since January 2022 and she graduated in February 2022.

Contact: jfcastro@zoologie.uni-kiel.de

Nico started his PhD project in the research group of Tobias Kaiser in 2017. He investigated the loss of biological clocks in northern populations of non-biting midgets using molecular methods.
Nico studied biology at the University of Leipzig with a strong focus on animal evolution and systematic. In his bachelor thesis he used molecular biological methods to search for a specific toxin in venomous marine Polychaetes. His master thesis had a bioinformatic background, in which he identified various toxins in the transcriptome of robber flies in order to describe their venom composition.
After his wrap-up in Plön Nico currently is in a postdoc position at Trier University in the Henrik Krehenwinkel group.

Contact: fuhrmannn@uni-trier.de
 

Christoph was born near Kaiserslautern, Germany. He did his Bachelor in Biology at the University of Erlangen and his Masters in Behavioural Neurobiology at the University of Groningen (Netherlands).
In his doctoral studies, Christoph worked on the Molecular basis of speciation in three-spined stickleback in the Evolutionary Ecology department of Manfred Milinski at the Max-Planck Institute in Plön. Christoph defended his thesis in 2019 and continued his work as a postdoc with Manfred Milinski until 2020.

After her bachelor degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of the Basque Country, Spain, in 2017 Ana moved to Barcelona, where she received her Master degree in Genetics and Genomics for her thesis on the evolution of the GAL gene regulatory pathway in yeasts. Ana’s main scientific interests are genetics, microbiology and evolution, which led her to the IMPRS and to Tal Dagan’s lab in 2019, where she studied plasmid evolution from the plasmid perspective, focusing on the segregation of the plasmid copies during cell division for her doctorate until November 2022. Ana is currently wrapping up in the Dagan lab. Since January 2023 Ana is a postdoc in Marco Fumasoni’s lab Genome Maintenance and Evolution at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) in Portugal.

Contact: agarona@igc.gulbenkian.pt

Ashley was born in Chicago, and finished her bachelor studying animal sciences at Purdue University (USA) in 2013. She then moved to Germany to pursue research, focusing on microbiology at the University of Würzburg. She was working on the evolution of antibiotic resistance for her PhD, in the group of Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schulenburg. Her research interests centered on alternative antibiotic therapies that limit the resistance of evolution in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Ashley defended her thesis in 2020.
She is currently working at the Max Rubner Institute in Kiel on both specific spoilage bacteria and microbiota generally in raw milk and milk products, with the ultimate goal of reducing waste because of spoilage organisms.

Contact: ashley.gedon@mri.bund.de

Originally from Rothenburg/Oberlausitz Henry concluded his graduate studies in Marine Biology at the University of Rostock. Afterwards, he worked as field assistant for several research institutes until he joined our IMPRS in 2016. His PhD project was based in the pipefish group of Dr. Olivia Roth at the Geomar Kiel, supervised by Dr. Carolin Wendling. It focused on rapid evolutionary adaptation in response to anthropogenic stressors in a three-way host-parasite interaction. The model system consists of pipefish Syngnathus typhle as final host, bacteria of the genus Vibrio, and their associated temperate phages. Henry defended his thesis in February 2021. He currently has a postdoc position as scientific coordinator at the Geomar Kiel .

Contact: hgoehlich@geomar.de

Bilal was born in Lahore, Pakistan. He received his undergraduate degree in Plant Pathology from University of the Punjab (2013) and completed his masters in Biotechnology from National Institute for Biotechnology & Genetic Engineering (NIBGE) in 2015. Plant pathogen interaction in disease development was the turning point to studying evolutionary biology. Bilal joined Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2016, where he explored the role of zkt gene in Arabidopsis thaliana, PDZ domain containing proteins in plants and also part of mango ripening in the post genomic era project. Having joined our IMPRS in 2018, Bilal was working with Dr. Julien Dutheil in the department of Evolutionary Genetics at the MPI, developing new methods for the inference of selection in protein sequences and studying co-evolution at amino acid level considering biochemical constraints. After his defense in Mai 2021 and postdoc wrap up in the Dutheil group he moved to London.
Currently, he is working at Queen Mary University of London as a postdoc in Lee Henry's lab on host microbes' interactions and the evolution of host immunity and bacterial symbiosis.

Contact: m.haider@qmul.ac.uk
 

She is from the East Coast of Canada, where she completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology at the University of New Brunswick.
From these studies, her interest in host-microbe interactions grew and this is how she has found herself studying the evolution of the microbiota-gut-brain axis within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology. Her work was done under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Bosch at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel.
Danielle graduated in summer 2020 and has returned 
to Canada.

She comes from Hamburg, Germany, and studied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Kiel and Berlin. For her master thesis she worked at the MPI in Plön in the Community Dynamics group of the Evolutionary Ecology Department. She has started her PhD project with Dr. Linda Odenthal-Hesse of the Evolutionary Genetics Department, working on meiotic recombination in canids.
Alina defended her thesis in summer 2020 and has now a position as a postdoc at UKSH Kiel.

Contact: Alina.Hartmann@uksh.de more

Elzbieta was born in Warsaw, Poland, where she studied Biology and Psychology at the University of Warsaw. She received her B.Sc. in Population Genetics in 2011 and continued her education at the faculty of Oceanography and Marine Environments at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI), where she obtained her M.Sc. diploma in 2014. She did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön (Germany) working within the group Evolutionary Genetics of fish under supervision of Dr. Arne Nolte.
Elzbieta defended her thesis in 2018 and continued her work as a postdoc. Currently, she is doing another postdoc at the Natural History Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

Contact: ela.iwaszkiewicz@nrm.se

Zahra was born in Iran and obtained her BSc and MSc in Microbiology from the University of Tehran working on bacterial community dynamics.
In 2017, she joined the IMPRS working together with Jenna Gallie.
Zahra defended her thesis in 2020. Currently, she is a post doctoral research associate in the division of evolution and genomic science, University of Manchester.

Contact: zahra.khomarbaghi@manchester.ac.uk

Kohar’s scientific journey started by majoring in Biology at Haigazian University, in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2006. For her Masters degree in Microbiology and Immunology, at the American University of Beirut, she defended on Anti- Aspergillus fumigatus IgY antibodies and their protective efficacy in cyclosporine A treated BALB/c mice, in 2013. Immediately thereafter Kohar worked as a research assistant at the American University of Beirut Medical Center in the department of experimental pathology, microbiology and immunology, being involved in various projects focused on antimicrobial resistance and the potential therapeutic options. Kohar joined our IMPRS in 2016 and until her defense in June 2021, Kohar she was studying the tripartite interactions: microbiota-pathogen-host, dissecting the protective efficacy of the natural microbiota members against pathogenic infections in the C. elegans host in the group of Hinrich Schulenburg, supervised by Katja Dierking. Kohar is currently wrapping up her work in the Schulenburg group.

Contact: kkissoyan@zoologie.uni-kiel.de
 

Rebecca was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. She completed her BSc at the Univeristy of Prince Edward Island, Canada in 2008 and MSc in Ecology and Evolution at the University of Berne, Switzerland in 2013. She was working in the Evolution of Behaviour group supervised by Dr. Miriam Linnenbrink, being part of the department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön. Rebecca graduated in 2017 and is currently wrapping up her work on individual behaviour and the influence different strategies have on life history, territoriality and mate choice between two recently diverged populations of Mus musculus domesticus.

Contact: rekrebs@evolbio.mpg.de

Ana was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and studied Biology at the University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic, where she received her M. Sc. in Botany in 2007. Within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology, she was working on environmentally dependent within-host evolution of opportunistic pathogens in the group for Evolutionary Ecology of Marine Fishes with Dr. Mathias Wegner at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (Geomar) and the Wadden Sea Station Sylt of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Arctic and Marine Research.

Juan was born in Bogotá, Colombia. He received his BSc and Masters in Biology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he studied the evolution of immune systems in primates. For his PhD he was working on epigenetics and gene expression of different migration patterns of birds, in the Behavioral Genomics research group under the supervision of Dr. Miriam Liedvogel at Max Planck Institute, using high throughput sequencing approaches to unravel the molecular mechanisms controlling different traits in the migratory behaviour with blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) as model organism. Currently, he is wrapping up as postdoc in the Liedvogel group.

Contact: lugor@evolbio.mpg.de

Born and raised in Northern Germany, he graduated from the University of Kiel in 2015 with a master’s degree in Evolutionary Biology & Ecology. In his master thesis he investigated the collateral effects of antibiotic resistance in bacteria isolated from cystic fibrosis patients and compared it to those found in in-vitro evolved strains. Being inspired by evolutionary research on antibiotic resistance, he decided to return to the University of Kiel to pursue his PhD on the influence of periodic bottlenecks on experimental antibiotic resistance evolution under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schulenburg.
Niels graduated in spring 2020 and continued his project with the Schulenburg group as postdoc. Since May 2021 he is a consultant at Ecker + Ecker GmbH, Germany.

Mareike was born in Berlin, Germany and studied Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Philipps-University in Marburg. For her Bachelor and Master Thesis, she worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in the group of Eva Stukenbrock. In order to do her PhD she moved to Kiel, where she was working at the Botanical Intitute of the Christian-Albrechts University with the plant pathogenic fungus Zymoseptoria tritici, supervised by Eva Stukenbrock. Her research interests were epigenetic processes such as Histone- and DNA Methylation combined with evolutionary analyses.
Mareike defended her thesis in 2018 and is currently doing her postdoc (on a DFG research fellowship) at Oregon State University.

Contact: moellmar@oregonstate.edu

Jacqueline started hery scientific career as an undergraduate at Grinnell College, USA with a double major in Biology and French Literature. She then moved to Denmark and did her Masters at the University of Copenhagen in Microbiology. After completing hery Masters, Jacqueline moved to Germany where she pursued her PhD in Prof. Dr. Philip Rosenstiel's lab at the IKMB in Kiel working on the host-microbial interaction of pathogen infection in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Jacqueline defended her thesis in 2017 and is currently wrapping up her work.

Contact: j.anderson@ikmb.uni-kiel.de

Ana Filipa is from Portugal and started her PhD in the Evolutionary Genetics department under the supervision of Dr. Julien Dutheil in 2017.
She received her M.Sc. degree from CIBIO, Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, University of Porto, Portugal, where she studied the Evolutionary History of a desert specialist, Jaculus jaculus, by applying a multi-locus approach to infer species phylogenetic signal of differentiation and potential processes driving speciation.  For her PhD project, she researched the impact of the structure of biomolecules on sequence evolution by applying a population genetics approach.
Ana Filipa graduated in spring 2020. She is currently working as a postdoc at University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

Contact: A.F.Moutinho@sussex.ac.uk

Anuradha is from Kolkata, India. She received her B.Sc. in Microbiology from Lady Brabourne College, University of Calcutta and then pursued a Master’s degree in Biotechnology at thd Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
She achieved her PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Plön, supervised by Dr. Jenna Gallie. Her work focussed on understanding the evolutionary origins of codon usage bias using Pseudomonas fluorescens as our model organism.
Anuradha defended her thesis in 2020.  She is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Research Group Medical Systems Biology of Prof. Dr. Christoph Kaleta at the Institute of Experimental Medizine at UKSH, Kiel.

Contact:a.mukherjee@iem.uni-kiel.de

Stella was born in Neumünster, Germany, and studied Biology at the University in Kiel, where she received my Diploma Degree in 2012. She was an IMPRS student between 2013 and 2017 working on the dopaminergic system in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, supervised by Prof. Dr. Thomas Roeder (Department of Molecular Physiology, CAU Kiel).
Stella now continues her scientific career at the Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience (DANDRITE) at Aarhhus University in Denmark.

Contact: sn@dandrite.au.dk

I was born in Istanbul, Turkey. She studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. She received her B.Sc. in 2014 and continued her education at the faculty of Biology in the same university where she obtained my M.Sc. diploma in 2015. She followed her interest for evolutionary biology and continued her studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, working within the Environmental Genomics group as PhD student obtaining her PhD degree in 2020. Ezgi is currently working as a PostDoc in the Hildebrand group at the Quadram Institute Bioscience in Norwich, UK. Her main interests are metagenomics data analysis and vertical transmission of microbial communities. Contact: Ezgi.ozkurt@quadram.ac.uk

Luisa was born in Ocaña, Colombia, and studied Biology at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, where she graduated in 2010. Within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology, she was between 2011 and 2015 working on the "Evolution of the skull shape in mice" in the Department for Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Plön, supervised by Prof. Dr. Diethard Tautz. Luisa started her postdoctoral research in the same group, and in 2016 moved to Princeton University, USA, with a postdoctoral HFSP fellowship where she worked in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
In 2022, Luisa moved back to Germany where she is leading the Max Planck Research Group ‘Evolutionary Genomics of Complex Traits’ in the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society, in Tuebingen.

Contact: luisa.pallares@tuebingen.mpg.de

Born in southern England, Jamie carried out his B.Sc (Medical Genetics) and M.Sc (Tropical Marine Biology) at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Essex, respectively. Following a couple of years working in marine conservation for various NGOs, Jamie started his Ph.D in the Marine Evolutionary Ecology group at the GEOMAR institute in Kiel under the supervision of Olivia Roth. His project focused on the evolutionary relationship between male pregnancy and the immune system in syngnathid fishes (seahorses and pipefish), with results helping to reinforce the importance of immunological tolerance during male pregnancy. Jamie defended his thesis in February 2022 and is currently working as a postdoc at the CAU, Kiel.

Contact: jparker@geomar.de

Carola was born in Germany and studied Biology at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel (CAU), where she received her Master in 2011. Between 2011 and 2015, she did her PhD within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology working on the natural ecology of Caenorhabditis elegans in the Department of Evolutionary Ecology and Genetics at the CAU. Her supervisor was Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schulenburg. Carola continued her research in this group as a postdoc for several years before she switched to the lab of Prof. Dr. Matthias Leippe as a research associate.

Contact: cpetersen@zoologie.uni-kiel.de

Sophie was born in France and studied at McGill University (Canada) and at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama) where she received her M.Sc. degree in Biology in 2013. She continued working in Panama as a field assistant until she got accepted in the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology working on the genomic architecture underlying adaptation and speciation in coral reef fishes under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Oscar Puebla at the GEOMAR. After her graduation in 2017, Sophie took up a postdoctoral position at Michigan State University working as a Research Associate in the Integrative Biology department in the Gallant lab. In June 2021 she will start another postdoc, still at Michigan State University, but in the lab of Dr. Benbow in the Entomology department.

Contact: picqsoph@msu.edu

Agnes studied Biology at the University of Hamburg and the Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, both Germany until 2013. She conducted her Master thesis at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (Geomar).
Agnes was a PhD student within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology working on the interaction between the tapeworm Schistocephalus solidus and the three-spined stickleback. She was part of the Parasitology Group of Dr. Martin Kalbe at the Max Planck Institute in Plön.
Agnes defended her thesis in 2019 and after a wrap-up in the Rainey group she worked as a postdoc in the group of Hinrich Schulenburg at the CAU Kiel until May 2021. Agnes is now a science communication freelancer.

Contact: info@agnespiecyk.com

Federica was born in Rome (Italy) where she studied Human Biology and Evolution at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She conducted her Master thesis at Centre for Human Palaeoecology & Evolutionary Origins at University of York (UK) and received her Masters Degree in 2013.
In 2014, Federica joined as a visiting student the Paleogenomics Lab at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (Spain). She then started her PhD within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology working on the evolution and function of adaptive immunogenetic diversity in humans in the group of Dr. Tobias Lenz.
Federica defended her thesis in 2019 and continued her research in the same lab before moving to France. She is currently working as a postdoc with Flora Jay (CNRS – University of Paris-Saclay, France), Emilia Huerta-Sanchez (Brown University, USA), and Maria Avila Arcos (UNAM, Mexico) in the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) project "Evolutionary changes in human hosts and their pathogens during first contact in the New World".

Contact: federica.pierini@lri.fr

Born in Sasolburg, South Africa, Lizel grew up in Johannesburg and studied in Pretoria. Having completed her B.Sc. in Biotechnology at the University of Pretoria (UP) she pursued a B.Sc. (Hons) in Genetics in 2014 and was assigned a mycology project in the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) at UP. Continuing with the project for her M.Sc. Lizel opted for a purely bioinformatic approach to characterise and compare a pectinase within and between species in the Agaricales which sealed the fate of her ongoing interest in fungi.
In her PhD studies in the Environmental Genomics group led by Prof. Dr. Eva Stukenbrock, Lizel was working on Cercospora beticola and moved from the land of pectinases to genomics, aiming to answer questions regarding the differences between populations of C. beticola. After her graduation in spring 2021, Lizel accepted a position as Biotechnician at Strube D&S GmbH, Söllingen, Germany.

Contact: L.Potgieter@strube-research.net

 

Philipp was born in Greiz (Thüringen), Germany, and studied Biology at the University of Bayreuth and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Evolution Ecology and Systematics Program) where he received his M. Sc. in 2010. He did his PhD within the IMPRS for Evolutionary Biology between 2010 and 2015 working on the influence of blood group related antigens on the intestinal microbiota in the Evolutionary Genomics group with Prof. Dr. John Baines at the Max Planck Institute in Plön and the Excellence Cluster "Inflammation at Interfaces" Kiel. After being a postdoc in the same group for two years, he moved to Denmark where Philipp currently works as a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen.

Contact: philipp.rausch@bio.ku.dk

Vandana was born in Chennai, India. She did her BSc in Physics from Delhi University and later joined an Erasmus Mundus programme through which she graduated from Ghent University, Belgium with an MSc in Nuclear Fusion and Engineering Physics. While doing her numerical projects related to computational physics and out of general curiosity, she read about nonlinear dynamics, evolutionary dynamics and game theory in particular that are used in mathematical biology and all these attracted her to the field of evolutionary biology.
Vandana is mainly interested in developing models (mostly based on game theory) for social evolution, life-history evolution and thus was doing her PhD in the Department of Evolutionary Theory in Dr. Chaitanya S. Gokhale's Research Group for Theoretical Models in Eco-Evolutionary dynamics.
Vandana defended her thesis in 2020 and is currently working as a postdoc at University of Illinois, USA.

Contact: vandana@evolbio.mpg.de

Roderich was born in Mannheim, Germany, and studied Biology at the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel. He received his Bachelor’s degree in 2014. His thesis project on antibiotic resistance evolution in the lab of Prof. Hinrich Schulenburg was so exciting that he headed straight into his PhD project studying how bacteria evolve in fluctuating environments. He analysed how bacteria optimize fitness in environments that change unpredictably.
Roderich defended his thesis in 2018 and moved to Sweden where he did a postdoc at Uppsala University. Roderich received the Gilbert S. Omenn-Preis 2019 of the International Society für Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, ISEMPH.

Contact: roderich.romhild@imbim.uu.se

Mario studied theoretical physics at the Christian-Albrechts-University, in his home-town Kiel, Germany, and received his M.Sc. in 2018. Evolutionary Theory started to fascinate him during an internship with Dr. Arne Traulsen in 2017 and consequently, Mario joined Hildegard Uecker’s research group Stochastic Evolutionary Dynamics at the MPI, Plön, for his doctoral research on the role of plasmids in antibiotic resistance. Mario defended in December 2022.
Mario is currently working as a Postdoctoral researcher in the research group of Tal Dagan “Evolutionary Microbiology” at Kiel University, studying the evolution of mobile plasmids. He mainly works in collaborative projects with experimentalists predicting and analyzing evolutionary processes on multicopy plasmids.

Contact: msanter@ifam.uni-kiel.de
 

Puspendu was born in India and studied Integrated MSc in Biological Sciences at the National Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhubaneswar, India. Within the IMPRS, he joined Prof. Dr. Frank Kempken's group at the University of Kiel (CAU) working on computational biology of fungal genes. He defended his thesis in 2017. Currently, he is working as a Postdoc on environmental microbiology at the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research field includes microbial genetics, meta-omics, and bioinformatics.

Contact: puspendu.sardar@gmail.com

Lara studied Biology in her hometown Münster (Germany), moved to Kiel for a master course in Biological Oceanography and graduated in 2017, after working on the adaptation of different marine invertebrates to the environmental conditions in the Baltic Sea.
Currently, following her dissertation in February 2022,  Lara is holding a postdoc position at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in the working group of Prof. Ute Hentschel, investigating the interaction of the Baltic sponge Halichondria panicea with its associated symbionts.

Contact: lschmittmann@geomar.de

Malavi is from Hyderabad, India, and has completed her Master’s degree in Biotechnology at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. She did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Plön, supervised by Dr. Tobias Lenz. Her work focussed on unravelling the genomic organisation of the Major Histocompatibility Complex in three-spined sticklebacks.
Malavi defended her thesis in 2019. She went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Currently, she is a postdoc in the Department of Environmental Studies, Ashoka University, India.

Contact: malavi.sengupta@ashoka.edu.in

Born in a small town in Haryana, India, Vaibhvi grew up in New Delhi. For her master’s thesis at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali, India, she worked in Dr. N G Prasad’s lab on a long-term experimental evolution project, selecting some Drosophila melanogaster populations for an elevated immune response and investigating the mechanism for it. In 2018, I joined as a PhD student in Prof. Dr. Thomas Roeder's group at the University of Kiel. For her thesis Vaibhvi worked on understanding the resource allocation changes in an animal on manipulating its diet. Using the fruit fly as a model, she measured different somatic and reproductive traits on reducing dietary protein, with a special focus on the immune response. Vaibhvi successfully defended her thesis in December 2022.

Contact: vvaibhvi@zoologie.uni-kiel.de
 

Tanita Wein was born in Germany and did her PhD under the supervision of Tal Dagan at the ZMB at Kiel University.
She defended her thesis in 2019 and is currently doing a postdoc at the Department of Molecular Genetics of the Weizmann Insititute of Science in Israel.

Contact: tanita.wein@weizmann.ac.il

Lei grew up in Qingdao, China. He received his bachelor's degree in marine biological resources and environment from Ocean University of China in 2014 and his master's degree in Marine Ecology from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017. Afterwards, Lei moved to Kiel to pursue his PhD under the supervision of Professor Thorsten Reusch at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research where he has now a position as a postdoc. His research focusses on the evolutionary biology of seagrasses.

Contact: lyu@geomar.de

Following his BSc in Biotechnological Engineering from the National Polytechnic Institute in Guanajuato, Mexico, Roman received his MRes in Biosciences from University College London after a dissertation on modeling de-novo design of mutualisms.
From January 2018 until December 2021 Roman worked on his doctoral project in the Department of Evolutionary Theory at the MPI for Evolutionary Biology under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Arne Traulsen and Dr. Michael Sieber. He was studying the eco-evolutionary dynamics of the holobiont (host + microbiota) using multiple theoretical approaches. Currently, Roman is a postdoc at the MPI Plön. He will move to London in 2023 for a new postdoc position at the UCL.

Contact: zapien@evolbio.mpg.de