People

Vassia is the postdoctoral researcher in the DFG-funded project "IMMUBASE" under the supervision of Prof. Thorsten Reusch, Prof. Ruth Schmitz-Streit, and myself.

She is interested in the interaction of early-diverging metazoans with their microbial symbionts.

Her project focus on understanding the evolution of the immune system and the positive selection of immune-related genes under specific environments through comparative genomic analyses and transcriptomic data.

PhD fellow at the Marine Symbioses group at GEOMAR under my supervision. Angela is interested in characterizing the immune system of sponges and other aspects of sponge ecology. Her PhD thesis aims to decipher the mechanisms for immune specificity in sponges. Member of the PhD Program IMPRS-Evolutionary Biology.

Former PhD fellow at the Marine Symbioses group at GEOMAR, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ute Hentschel and myself. Her PhD thesis aimed at developing Halichondria panicea as a sponge model for investigating host-microbe interactions. Lara is currently a postdoc at the group of Ocean Dynamics at GEOMAR, as part of an interdisciplinary project.

Former PhD candidate at the Marine Symbioses group at GEOMAR, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ute Hentschel and myself. Yu-Chen was interested in different aspects of species-species interactions, such as chemical ecology. Her PhD thesis aimed to decipher the molecular, cellular, and chemical response of the Mediterranean sponge Aplysina aerophoba upon grazing by the sea slug Tylodina perversa. Yu-Chen has moved to the private sector and she works for a biotech company.

Violeta is studying Biology at the UAM (Autonomous University of Madrid) and came to our lab for 2.5 months thanks to an agreement between her University and CERFA (Sociedad de Científicos Espanoles en la República Federal Alemana), plus the support of a ERASMUS fellowship. She helped Lara in the lab and established the qPCR technique to quantify the number of symbiont sequences in samples from Lara's experiments. Violeta is very responsible and did a terrific job during her time with us! And we had a lot of fun as well.

Theresa was a Master student at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and came to Kiel for her Master thesis. She did her Master thesis on “The response of the Baltic Sea sponge Halichondria panicea upon challenge with Vibrio bacteria”. Since March 2018 Theresa is a PhD candidate at the Molecular Microbial Ecology Group at the Institute of Network Biology (INET) in Munich. She is also deputy student representative of the Helmholtz Graduate School Environmental Health.

Berta Pintó, former Master student at University of Barcelona (Spain), has recently started her PhD with the aim of understanding how sponges are affected by grazing. She performed her Master thesis between Barcelona and Kiel under my supervision, with her project “Citizen Science: disclosing the interaction between Tylodina perversa and Aplysina aerophoba.”

Smail performed his Bachelor thesis under my supervision at GEOMAR. He focused on optimizing real time-qPCR for characterizing gene expression in sponges.