VEO and MGX at the Senckenberg Museum

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
Image: Roos Brouns
Angela Wanjugu Muraya
Doctoral Researcher
Angela Muraya
Image: Angela Muraya
Room 202
Rosalind-Franklin-Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
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Mikhail Fofanov
Guest Scientist / Doctoral Researcher
Utrecht University
Mikhail Fofanov
Image: Mikhail Fofanov
Room 105
Rosalind-Franklin Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
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Swapnil Prakash Doijad, Dr
Bioinformatics Lab Manager
Swapnil Doijad
Image: Swapnil Doijad
Room 204
Rosalind-Franklin-Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
Torsten Schubert, Dr
Laboratory Manager
Torsten Schubert
Image: Torsten Schubert
Room 204
Rosalind-Franklin-Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
Varada Milind Khot, Dr
Varada Khot
Image: Sybille Huck
Room 203
Rosalind-Franklin-Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
Wallapat Phongtang
Doctoral Researcher
Wallapat Phongtang
Image: Nisanart Kaenwong
Room 202
Rosalind-Franklin-Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link
Xiu Jia, Dr
Postdoctoral Researcher
Xiu Jia
Image: Xiu Jia
Room 106
Rosalind-Franklin-Straße 1
07745 Jena Google Maps site planExternal link

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.

Heyde Francielle Carmo França: February 2024 - March 2024

Portrait of Prof. Heyde Francielle Carmo França

Image: Heyde Francielle Carmo França

Project: 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: June 2023 - October 2023

José Luis López

Image: José Luis López

Project: 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 linkISME J. doi: 10.1038/s41396-023-01453-6External link

Current position: José is now a Postdoc at the VEO Group!

Susie Grigson: September - December 2023

Susanna R. Grigson

Image: Susanna R. Grigson

Project: 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: June 2023 - September 2023

Dan Liu

Image: Dan Liu

Project: 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: January - July 2023

Daniel Garza

Image: Daniel Garza

Project: 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: October 2022 - March 2023

Cédric Lood

Image: Cédric Lood

Project: Bacterial defense systems

Paper: Dann Turner, Andre N. Shkoporov,  Cédric Loodet 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: January - March 2023

Adéla Finstrlova

Image: Adéla Finstrlova

Project: 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: Scientific assistant from February - April 2023

David Appiah

Image: Sybille Huck

Project: Collect and gather time series data from scientific publications

Yasas Rajitha Wijesekara: February - May 2022

Yasas Wijesekara

Image: Yasas Wijesekara

Project: 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.