Our Alumni
Cristina Llopis-Belenguer joined the group in April 2021 as an ETH PostDoc Fellow, working on network analyses of parasite communities. In 2024 she went back to her academic roots, the Cavanilles Institute Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology at University of Valencia, to continue her work there. See more about her research interests here.
Kirstin Kopp worked as a postdoc and research associate in various projects, looking at cryptic species diversity and invasive species using molecular tools and was also participated in teaching und supervision. She is now Associate Director at Download Velux Stiftung.
When Download Francesco Pomati was part of the Aquatic Ecology group he was working with a high frequency monitoring tool to investigate the ecological processes that control community dynamics in phytoplankton with the aim of understanding and modelling impacts of environmental change or stress events on aquatic organsims. Francesco is now a tenure-track Researcher & Group leader at Eawag.
Ines Fontes studied as a postdoctoral researcher from 2015 to 2016 host-parasite interactions in the Bryozoa - Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae system in Hanna Hartikainen's group.
Download Luisa Ricaurte defended her thesis on wetland management concepts in South American and Europe (Integrative analysis of habitats as a tool for sustainable ecosystem management). She continues her career in consulting in Colombia and Switzerland.
Download Anssi Karvonen is a specialist for host-parasite interactions between fish and trematodes and worked as a PostDoc in our group. Anssi moved on to be a Senior Research Fellow of the Acadamy of Finland, with whom our group regularly collaborates.
Download Irene Keller was part of the CCES Biochange project where she used molecular and statistical tools to study the spatial and temporal structure of natural populations to identify the factors promoting or preventing population persistence, neutral or adaptive divergence and speciation. Irene went afterwards to work at the Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit of the University of Bern.
Download Andrew Park worked as a postdoc in the European SexASex project. He then went on as an Assistant Professor at the Odum School of Ecology and the Department of Infectious Diseases, College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia, US.
Download Denis Roy worked in the AquaDivers project as a postdoc before he moved to the University of Dalhousie, Canada to work with Daniel Ruzzante.Now he is an Assistant Professor in the Natural Resource Sciences, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, at the McGill University, Canada.
Download Lisa Shama did a postdoc on the evolution of parthenogenesis in Swiss populations of the psychid bagmoth, Dahlica triquetrella before she moved to the Alfred-Wegener Institute on the island of Sylt.
Download Gaku Takimoto did some modelling as a postdoc in the AquaDivers project. He is now Professor of the Theoretical Ecology group at University of Toho in Japan.
Download Tiina Salo investigated how stress affects organisms, communities, populations and ecosystems in the Lymnaea system during her postdoc in the Seppälä group.
Cansu Cetin defended her PhD thesis in January 2023 in Otto Seppälä's group. She examined adaptive evolution of immune activity and studied the heritability of immunesystem traits in natural populations in a freshwater snail model, Lymnaea stagnalis.
Teo Cereghetti defended his PhD thesis in December 2022. He did transcriptome profiling of a freshwater snail Lymnaea stagnalis for ecoimmunological research and studied the adaptive evolution of immune activity in Otto Seppälä's group.
Natalia Zajac defended her PhD thesis in December 2020. She worked on topics revolving around functional genomics and evolutionary biology. She stayed for a short time as a PostDoc (until April 2021) in Jukka`s lab to finish some projects, before she moved on to the next step in her carrier at University of Lausanne. There she worked as a PostDoc Researcher in the Department of Computational Biology before she moved on to work as a Specialist Genome Informatics to the Functional Geomics Center Zurich. Download More info here
Natalie Sieber worked as a PhD student on the detection of aquatic diseases from eDNA in water samples, partly in Jukka Jokelas Group and partly in Christoph Vorburger's Evolutionary Ecology research group at EAWAG's Aquatic Ecology Department. For details on the project please visit the Download Vorburger Lab Web pages.
Download Moritz Lürig completed his PhD in the Matthews lab at Eawag Kastanienbaum, co-supervised by Jukka Jokela as part of ETH Zürich’s Center for Adaptation to a Changing Environment (Download ACE). For his dissertation he explored the role of species interactions within different levels of ecological organization and across a range of ecological contexts, i.e. how species interactions can shape phenotypic distributions of populations, developmental trajectories of phenotypes, and resistance and resilience of ecosystems in response to external disturbance.
Moritz moved on to be an SNF/Marie Curie fellow with Erik Svensson at Lund University (Sweden), where he uses a phenomics approach to investigate sexual polymorphisms in natural populations.
Robert Dünner was a PhD Student in the Aquatic Ecology Group at Eawag, supervised by Prof. Jukka Jokela. He worked on "Parasite Ping Pong: Host-parasite coevolution, metapopulation structure and genetic diversity".
After he had spend some time at ETH/Eawag first as a Hilfsassistant, then as a Masterstudent, a research assisstant and finaly as a PhD student he started a position in infectious disease modelling in Melissa Pennys group at the Swiss Tropical Health Institute in Basel, Switzerland, in October 2020.
Download Dorota Paczesniak did her PhD on ecological & evolutionary dynamics in natural populations of sexual & asexual lineages of the New Zealand mud snail Potamopyrgus antipodarum. Afterwards she moved on to IPK Gattersleben to work in the apomixis group on Boechera.
Amongst other projects, Laura Langeloh studied during her PhD in Otto Seppälä´s group genetic and maternal effects which determined variation in the immune function of a mixed-mating freshwater snail (Lymnaea stagnalis).
Download Lukas DeVentura worked as a PhD student on predicting the Dreissena Invasion to Switzerland in Jukka Jokela's Group before he moved on to work as a freshwater biologist to the Abteilung für Umwelt, Kanton Aargau.
Katja Leicht was a PhD student in Otto Seppälä's group. She worked on thermal adaptation in an aquatic freshwater snail and the interaction with the immune system and did experiments to figure out the quantitative genetic basis for these traits.
Download Anja Westram moved after her PhD on the cryptic species diversity of the Gammarus fossarum complex in Jukka Jokela's group to Roger Butlin's lab in Sheffield, working on the genomic basis of adaptation and speciation. Now Anja continues her work on evolutionary genetics in Nick Bartons group at the IST in Austria.
After defending her PhD thesis on the ecology of sexual & asexual Ostracods in 2010 Download Maria Joaõ Martins went back to Portugal for a postdoc position and moved then on to work as a Research Assistant at the University of Algarve, Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behaviour.
Christian Rellstab was a postdoc in our Finnish satellite group, investigating the factors that influence the co-evolution of complex life cycle parasites an their hosts, focusing on the model system of the fish eye fluke Diplostomum, a freshwater snail and fish eating birds. Now he is back in Switzerland, working in Felix Gugerli's lab Download at WSL.
After defending her PhD thesis in December 2009 Download Sofia Adolfsson moved on to the University of Uppsala as a Marie Curie Fellow with Prof. Hans Ellegren. Then she worked as an Associate Researcher at the Lund University Cancer Centre, after which she became the Head of Bioinformatics at TATAA Biocenter in Sweden.
Download Katja-Riika Louhi defended her dissertation entitled "Evolutionary ecology of complex life cycle parasites – from genotypes to species assemblages” in 2012 and moved on for being a post-doc at the University of Jyväskylä with Anssi Karvonen. Now she is a Product Manager at Immuno Diagnostic Oy in Finland.
Emmy Gonzalez Gonzalez was a BSc student in Frida Feijen's and Claudia Buser's lab from April to October 2023, and studied the dynamics of killer yeast competition in a micro-chemostat setting. After her BSc project she stayed for some time in the group as a reasearch assistent.
Connor Morang worked from end of 2021 as a student assistent in the Jokela lab, after which he started aMSc project in Jukka Jokela's Lab in December 2022. He studied the very weird androgenesis reproduction mode of the Asian Clam Corbicula fluminea. After finishing his thesis Connor contiunued to work with Eawag as a research assistent. In summer 2023 he joined Blake Matthews (FishEc) in a field expedition to Greenland. Afterwards he continued as a reasearch assistent for some time in the Jokela group.
Yara Caduff was a BSc student working in Claudia Buser's lab where she investigated competition and dispersal within the killer yeast system. To conduct this research, she utilized fluorescently labelled (killer) yeast strains which compete against each other within small artificial landscapes.
Lars Sturm joined Claudia Buser's lab as a BSc student in May 2022. His initial research focused on the spatial-temporal distributions of "Killer Yeast" strains on the South Island of New Zealand. Continuing as a MSc student in the group he studied the consequences of sexual reproduction on the interaction between yeast host and killer virus.
Linus Hofstetter was a BSc student in Cristina Llopis Belenguer's lab and studied from March to Sept 2023 phenotypic effects of acanthocephalan parasites on Gammarus spp. Hel specifically focued on colouration, body shape and size variation.
Timo Siegrist was a BSc student in Claudia Buser's lab and studied fungal diversity during fermentation in white wine.
Adrian Jonsson was a BSc student working in Claudia Buser's lab. His research focused on studying the preference of Drosophila for yeast with and without killer viruses, and whether there is a difference in this preference based on sex, specifically within D. melanogaster.
Claudio Broger was a MSc student in Claudia Buser's lab from May to October 2022, working on the timing of yeast sporulation when associated with Drosophila.
Anja Pünten was a BSc student in Claudia Buser's lab from March to September 2022, working on "Killer Yeast" and Drosophila.
Levi Graf was a BSc student in Claudia Buser's Lab from April to September 2022, studying the effect of a parasite, Acanthocephalus, on cadmium concentrations of their host, Asellus aquaticus.
Kaja Widmer, former research asistent, she turned MSc student for a 6 months project on terrestrial isopods, supervised by Jukka Jokela and Frida Feijen during 2021.
Janika Angst, MSc student, project with Claudia Buser
Nov2020 - May2021
Christina Skirgaila, MSc student, project with Claudia Buser
Jan - June 2021
Saranhia Janjaroenjit, MSc student, project with Jukka Jokela in 2021
