PhD - Starting Date April 2021

The planned PhD position between Prof. Nikolas Gruber (Department of Environmental Systems Sciences, ETH Zurich) and that of Prof. Shinichi Sunagawa (Department of Biology, ETH Zurich) involves the interpretation of Tara Oceans metagenomic data and will start in April 2021. My research interests cover themes such as the community ecology with DNA metabarcoding, functional metagenomics and - transcriptomics and species distribution modelling in the marine environment. The PhD project is still a work in progress but will be focused on modelling the biogeography of metagenomic data. In this PhD project I will implement the methodological training received in species distribution modelling at ETH Zurich supervised by Dr. Meike Vogt and incorporate newly metagenomic data sets in those models with a special focus on prokaryotes. I will use species distribution model frameworks that have been developed and used by researchers from the Environmental Physics Group at ETH Zurich to estimate prokaryotic diversity patterns and biogeography.