Introduction
I am a microbial ecologist studying the symbiotic microbiomes in social animals. I completed my Master’s degree studying island ecology of gut microbiomes of wild lemurs in the Metapopulation Research Center in University of Helsinki. I then moved to Oxford for a doctoral degree in Zoology, studying transmission of gut bacteria in social networks of wild mice. After graduating in 2021, I spent three years as a postdoc in a Probabilistic modeling research group in the department of Computing at University of Turku, before starting as a JRF at Queen’s.
Research
As a biologist, my background is in island ecology and this has led me to study animals as if they are moving islands, carrying a mini-ecosystem of bacteria inside of them. Since microbes spread through social contact, we can treat social groups of animals as ‘archipelagos’ of microbial ecosystems, and the social networks of animals as the road map (or bridge map) of the landscape in which these ecosystems live. I research these processes by collecting data from an intensively monitored population of wild mice in Wytham woods and explore how the microbial communities living inside mice move through their host’s social networks. This way I aim to develop and test a new type of ‘metacommunity theory’ for ecological communities nested within complex networks.
I am deeply fascinated by networks and the analogies between different biological and socioeconomic systems as well as the metaphors we use to talk about these phenomena. We use metaphors like the tree of descendance both in biology and linguistics and we talk about networks or waves when referring to the interconnectedness of entities in space and time. When not running after mice, or working in the lab, I am working as part of groups of artists to explore new metaphors for complex phenomena of nature.
Publications
A list of my publications can be found here