ERC-funded Postdoc

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I am a Senior Research Associate in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia. I received my B.S. in 2009 and M.S. in 2011 from Yerevan State University. In 2013 I moved to Norway, where I pursued my second M.S. degree in Biology with the specialisation Microbiology from the University of Bergen, where I also worked as a research technician. Before joining the Lehtovirta-Morley in August 2020, I was a PhD student at the Radboud University Nijmegen, where I worked with newly discovered complete ammonia-oxidising (comammox) bacteria.

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Nitrification is an important part of the nitrogen cycle in many natural and engineered environments. It provides the key link between ammonium, the mineralisation product of organic nitrogen, and nitrate, the primary electron acceptor for denitrification, and thus regulates if nitrogen is retained or lost from an ecosystem. In my research, I aim to use targeted metagenomics to facilitate the directed recovery and characterisation of active ammonia oxidisers from soil ecosystems. We will also use a culture-dependent approach to estimate how the physiology and ammonia monooxygenase content of ammonia-oxidising cells changes when subjected to different growth conditions.

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