Open PhD position
We are hiring a PhD student to work with effects of antibiotics on microbial communities! The project will use large-scale techniques to investigate how sub-inhibitory concentrations of antibiotics affect microbial communities. Specifically, the project will examine how the ability for bacteria to colonize and invade established microbial communities is impacted by antibiotics. The project will also explore how antibiotics influence the interactions between different species in bacterial communities and if this may change their ability to withstand invasions. The goal is to identify the genes and mechanisms that contribute to change and stability in microbial communities.
A cool thing about this position is that it is fairly adaptable to the eventual candidate, and the project can be somewhat tailored to suit the profile of the PhD student. This means that we’re looking for someone who is either a bioinformatician or an experimentalist (or both). Previous experience with microbial communities is a plus, but not a must.
If you feel that you are the right person for this position, you can apply here. More information is also available here. We look forward to your application! The deadline for applications is December 9.
Goodbye Adriana and Welcome Emil
The shift to October marked the last days that our visiting doctoral student Adriana Osińska spent in the lab. Adriana was working on the sequencing data generated from the invasion experiments I performed in Jo Handelsman’s lab. She managed to dig out a great number of genes that seems to have an influence on bacterial community invasion success. Those genes are now candidate genes that will be tested in follow-up studies, which brings us to….
That I forgot to introduce our newest lab member – Emil Burman! Emil is a master student performing his thesis project in the lab and will stay with us until May 2020. Emil will work on experimentally characterizing the candidate genes that Adriana has identified. We are excited to have Emil in the lab and think that he has been off to a great start already. Welcome Emil!
Adriana will no go back to Poland to complete here PhD thesis early next year. We have loved to have her in the lab and she has contributed with data and analyses of tremendous value. We wish her all the best of luck with defending her thesis!
Reshaping this site
This spring I am on part time parental leave with my son, and I have taken the opportunity to reshape this web site a bit – after all its design has not been updated since I launched the site in 2010. With the new site, I want to extend the scope of the web page a bit, focusing more on the lab I am setting up at the University of Gothenburg and less on myself alone. This will be a bit by bit process, and as you will notice most of the content does not yet reflect this change (yet).
The fact that I am on part-time parental leave (actually more like “most-time”) means that I will be slower than usual at responding to e-mails until (at least) the beginning of June. It also (sadly) means that I will have to decline a lot of nice invitations and proposals, or at least move them into the future when possible.
Finally, here’s a few things that will happen this year regardless. In April (16th to 18th), I will be at ICOHAR in Utrecht, where I will give a talk in a session on the role of the environment in the spread of antimicrobial resistance. Then in June, I will attend ASM Microbe in San Fransisco (June 20-24), where I will co-chair a session on Environmental Resistomes together with Ashley Shade. In this session I will also give a talk on the effect of antibiotics on interactions in microbial communities. However, I will not attend EDAR-5 in Hong Kong this year – there simply wasn’t time to fit that into the agenda as well. (Also, I am trying to cut down on air travel which contributed to the decision not to go this year.)