Our new doctors in sedimentary DNA
Luke Elliott successfully defended his Ph.D. this winter. His first paper investigates the influence of glacial activity on vegetation and soil properties on an island in northern Norway. His second paper advances the capacity of sedaDNA to study intraspecific genetic diversity for palaeo-phylogeography. His third work, released as a preprint, is a bionformatical pipeline that annotates metagenomic datasets based on genome skims. He is preparing a manuscript to compare the taxonomic yield of metabarcoding, shotgun metagenomics, and target capture.
Luke is currently working as a postdoc with the ArcEcoGen research group at Tromsø Museum (UiT).
Izabella A. Baisheva
10/12/2024
Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and University of Potsdam
Potsdam, Germany
Izabella Baisheva successfully defended her Ph.D., which constitutes a major contribution to the limnology of Yakutia by applying sedaDNA metabarcoding of diatoms, macrophytes and terrestrial plants. Her first paper reconstructs the sequential formation and biological history of Lake Satagay, a thermokarst lake in Central Yakutia. Her second paper explores how this lake's surrounding vegetation was affected by wildfire activity during the Holocene. In a third paper, she investigated an intermontane basin lake in southwestern Yakutia, providing an unprecedented insight on freshwater and vegetation dynamics from the region between Lake Baikal and Central Yakutia, since the Last Glacial Maximum. She is developing a manuscript assessing the environmental and biological status of 66 lakes across Central Yakutia and the Oymyakon Plateau.
Izabella is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and a guest researcher at AWI, Potsdam, Germany. She is looking for a postdoctoral position in or around the Netherlands, any recommendations or connections would be well appreciated.