Dr. Daan Speth

Recent advances in sequencing technologies have dramatically altered our view of microbial diversity, and led to major discoveries of novel organisms involved in the carbon and nitrogen cycles. During his PhD at Radboud University (Netherlands), Daan applied metagenomics and other sequence-based bioinformatics to study microbial communities in wastewater and marine environments, with a focus on nitrogen and carbon transformations. He continued this work at Caltech (USA) and the Max Plank Institute of Marine Microbiology (Germany), and additionally became fascinated by the evolutionary history and diversity of protein families essential for anaerobic microorganisms. Since 2023, he has continued working on nitrogen cycling organisms as well as protein evolution at the University of Vienna.