Team
The members of the Viral Ecology and Omics Group within the Cluster of Excellence "Balance of the Microverse" at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.
VEO and MGX at the Senckenberg Museum
Alvaro Escobar Doncel
Doctoral Researcher
Rosalind-Franklin-Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
Angela Wanjugu Muraya
Doctoral Researcher
Aristeidis Litos
Doctoral Researcher
Bas Dutilh, Prof. Dr
Principal Investigator (PI)
Dorothee Isabell Massenberg
Team Assistant
José Luis López Arcondo
Postdoctoral Researcher
Malte Siemers, Dr
Postdoctoral Researcher
Maria Beatriz Walter Costa, Dr
Postdoctoral Researcher
Marcel Bäcker
Doctoral Researcher
Mikhail Fofanov
Guest Scientist / Doctoral Researcher
Utrecht University
Natia Geliashvili
Doctoral Researcher
Piotr Jaroslaw Rozwalak
Doctoral Researcher
Rabia Tabassum
Roos Brouns
Doctoral Researcher
Sandra Studenik, Dr
Technical Assistant
Swapnil Prakash Doijad, Dr
Bioinformatics Lab Manager
Torsten Schubert, Dr
Laboratory Manager
Varada Milind Khot, Dr
Wallapat Phongtang
Doctoral Researcher
Xiu Jia, Dr
Postdoctoral Researcher
Alumni
Pilleriin Peets February 2023 - January 2025
Pilleriin Peets
Image: Pilleriin Peets
Project: Metabolomics data mining and modeling - Finding ways to describe and compare the chemical space of different biomes, using chemical characterizations like chemical fingerprints instead of final annotation.
Jannick van Cauwenberghe April 2022 - August 2024
Jannick Van Cauwenberghe
Image: Jannick Van Cauwenberghe
Project: Quantifying the impact of bacteriophages and phage traitson bacterial population structure.
Katarzyna Morańska July 2024
Project: Katarzyna is working on uterine malignancies and their associated microbiome.
She is a PhD student in the Laboratory of Human Biological Development and Disease at Adam Mickiewicz UniversityExternal link, Poznan, Poland.
Portrait of Prof. Heyde Francielle Carmo França
Image: Heyde Francielle Carmo FrançaProject: Prediction of abiotic factors of bacterial habitats using machine learning techniques
Current position: Heyde is currently a professor at the Federal Institute of GoiásExternal link in the undergraduate program in Computer Science and in the postgraduate program in Agricultural Sciences. Read more about Heyde and her work here .
José Luis López
Image: José Luis LópezProject: Metabolic modeling and carbon use efficiency in soils
Paper: José Luis López , Arista Fourie, Sanne WM Poppeliers et al. (2023): Growth rate is a dominant factor predicting the rhizosphere effectExternal link . ISME J. doi: 10.1038/s41396-023-01453-6External link
Current position: José is now a Postdoc at the VEO Group!
Susanna R. Grigson
Image: Susanna R. GrigsonProject: inferring bacteriophage functions from protein-protein interactions
Current position: Susie is a PhD student at Flinders UniversityExternal link in Australia. Read more about Susie and her work hereExternal link .
Dan Liu
Image: Dan LiuProject: Predicting virus-host interactions with transitional learning
Stage Researcher of the VIROINF ConsortiumExternal link. She is currently a PhD student in virology at MRC-University of Glasgow Center for Virus ResearchExternal link (UK). Her main focus is on predicting virus-host interactions using protein language models.
Daniel Garza
Image: Daniel GarzaProject: Modeling human gut bacterial life strategies
Paper: Daniel Rios Garza , Didier Gonze, Haris Zafeiropoulos, Bin Liu, Karoline Faust (2023): Metabolic models of human gut microbiota: Advances and challengesExternal link , Cell Systems Perspective Volume 14, ISSUE 2 , P109-121, doi: 10.1016/j .cels.2022.11.002External link
Current position: Daniel is a junior scientist in the INRAEExternal link PROSEExternal link near Paris, France.
Cédric Lood
Image: Cédric LoodProject: Bacterial defense systems
Paper: Dann Turner, Andre N. Shkoporov, Cédric Lood . et al. (2023) : Abolishment of morphology-based taxa and change to binomial species namesExternal link , Arch Virol 168 , 74, doi: doi.org/10.1007/s00705-022-05694-2External link
Current position: Cédric is a postdoctoral fellow of the FWOExternal link . He is currently working at the Lab of Gene Technology, KU LeuvenExternal link (Belgium). His main focus in on phage-bacteria interactions in the clinical context of phage therapy against ESKAPE pathogens.
Adéla Finstrlova
Image: Adéla FinstrlovaProject: Phage defense systems
Papers: to be done
Current position: Adéla is working in Brno, Czechia in the Laboratory of Molecular Diagnostics of MicroorganismsExternal link as a researcher. Her main focus is on phage-host interaction, she primarily studies bacteria from genus Staphylococcus and their phages.
David Appiah
Image: Sybille HuckProject: Collect and gather time series data from scientific publications
Yasas Wijesekara
Image: Yasas WijesekaraProject: A machine learning pipeline to identify and characterize novel viruses in metagenome data
Papers: to be done
Current position: Yasas is an Early Stage Researcher at the VIROINF ConsortiumExternal link. He is currently enrolled for a PhD in medical informatics at the medical faculty of the University of GreifswaldExternal link (Germany). His main focus is on developing machine-learning methods for identifying viruses in metagenome and genome sequencing data.