Thanks to recent advances in sequencing technologies, we have a good understanding of the composition of microbial communities from all corners of the world, including animal guts, oceans, or soils. However, we often do not know what individual community members do, how they interact with each other, and how these interactions drive the community dynamics and function, which limits our ability to predict and alter those dynamics. Dr Gralka tackles this problem by combining lab experiments with ecological theory to uncover principles of how microbes work together to drive biogeochemical cycles.

Dr. Matti Gralka is an assistant professor in the A-LIFE department at VU Amsterdam. Before moving the Amsterdam, he was a Simons postdoctoral fellow in Marine Microbial Ecology at MIT where he studied the physiology, interactions, and communities of microbes mediating the degradation of biopolymers like chitin in the ocean. He did his PhD in Physics at the University of California Berkeley, where he worked on understanding how spatial structure affects evolutionary dynamics.

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