About me
I recently joined (Oct 1, 2022) Assoc. Prof. Birgit Wild group as a “Research Engineer” to support a range of research activities planned for 2022 and 2023, including for the new ERC Starting Grant project PRIMETIME on the impact of plant-soil interactions on Arctic CO2 fluxes.
I aim to assist in the conceptual development, establishment, and testing of experimental setups with soils and living plants in the field and laboratory, as well as working on a range of analytical equipment (e.g. EA/GC-IRMS, CRDS analyzers). Supporting and developing close interaction with postdocs, PhD and master students as well as collaboration partners is also part of my duties.
I got my PhD at Soil Science, Göttingen University, Germany in 2017 with Prof. Yakov Kuzyakov as supervisor. My doctoral thesis entitled “Crop Residue Decomposition and Stabilization in Soil Organic Matter”, describes the importance of soil structure, crop residue quality and quantity, SOM priming, and C translocation for SOM storage in cropland soils. By using two-three source partitioning isotopic-tracing techniques (12C, 13C, 14C), I elucidated different mechanisms, including “priming effect”, involved in SOM stabilization and decomposition in different soil compartments, defined on the basis of biological, physical, or physicochemical separations.
Before joining Stockholm University, I have been remained working as a postdoc at the Center for Environmental and Climate Science, Lund University (2019-2022) on a project “Climate costs of boreal forest clear-cutting – a multiscale experiment”. This project aims to assess the biotic (assessed through novel D2O and 13C isotopic tracing-based methods) and abiotic climate effects (‘costs’) of a clear-cutting boreal forest at Norunda, the forest research site with Sweden’s longest record of carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange between land and atmosphere.
After PhD in 2017, I worked for two years at the Soil and Environment department, SLU-Uppsala, with a research focus on “Turnover of organic matter in agricultural soil throughout the year”. The project was based on a Swedish long-term field experiment at Ultuna (started in 1956) in which C3-crops were replaced with maize (C4) in 2000. The objective was to investigate seasonal shifts in microbial utilization of C sources (by stable isotope tracing) and GHG emissions (CO2/CH4/N2O) throughout the year.
I have 10 weeks of pedagogical training (from SLU) for acquiring essential techniques and tools to perform effective teaching/supervision.
