Dr. Alexander Tagg was a postdoctoral researcher. He was working as PI for his own DFG-funded project PaintSed here at the IOW, which aimed to determine how paint particles infuence marine sediment microbial communities and use machine learning to design a model to infer paint pollution levels based on microbial community. Alongside this work.

Dr. Sophie Charvet worked at the IOW from 2014-2017. She worked within the EU funded project AFISmon. Her research was focussed, in the main, with the testing of the AFISsys, a device for the autonomous sampling and fixation of microbial mRNA.

Dr. Juliana Ivar do Sul remains at the IOW, now in the chemistry department. While part of WG Environmental Microbiology, she worked within the project PLASTRAT, to process microplastics for identification in sewage sludge. She also researched a number of microplastic-related topics during her time in the group, including the evaluation of glitter as a notable microplastic, and scientrometric links between microplastics and microbiology. She continues her work into the evaluation on whether microplastics can act as an indicator in sediment for the Anthropocene.

Dr. Renè Janßen completed his PhD at the IOW in 2020. His research was concerned with the impletmentation of machine learning tools for the interpretation of 16S microbial community data. His focus was particularly on how the herbicide glyphosate influences the microbial community in the Baltic sea, and how machine learning tools such as artificial neural networks and random forests can be used for this purpose.

Dr. Katherina Kesy completed her PhD at the IOW in 2019 as part of the MikrOMik project. Her research was concerned with the microbial communities which form on microplastics. She was particularly interested in how microplastics, and associated microbial biofilms, affect other organisms in marine systems, notable the blue mussel Mytilus edulis and the lugworm Arenicola marina.

Franziska Kläger worked at the IOW for a number of years. She performed research, including an investigation into how residual monomer contents in plastics can influence the interpretation of plastic degradation. However, her main role within the group was as co-ordinator for the project Microcatch_Balt.

Dr. Lars Möller completed his PhD at the IOW in 2019. His research was mainly concerned with investigation into Vibrio bacteria, notably with how Chinese aquaculture can affect Vibrio community structure in nearby coastal systems.

Dr. Sonja Oberbeckmann

Dr. Janine Wäge-Recchioni remains at the IOW, she is working in the WG Microbial Ecology since 2019. Janine did her PhD at the University of Hull (U.K.) in 2015. She worked within the WG Environmental Microbiology from 2016 - 2018 especially on zooplankton-mediated methane production, notably how microcapillary sampling of copepod gut microbiomes can be used to study this dynamic.