Sarahi Garcia appointed

Professor Dr Sarahi Garcia has been appointed to the professorship in Pelagic Microbiology at the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment.

Garcia studied biochemical engineering at the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila (Mexico) and received a master's degree in bioengineering from the University of Georgia (USA). She completed her PhD in microbiology at the University of Jena, Germany. She then became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), followed by a period at Uppsala University (Sweden), where she studied the ecology of freshwater bacteria. In 2019, she received a fellowship from the Swedish Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) and became an assistant professor at Stockholm University, where she focused on environmental genomics of aquatic microorganisms.

Garcia is particularly interested in aquatic bacteria, their interactions and their influence on the global carbon cycle. She uses an integration of cultivation and omics methods, i.e. methods that allow the analysis of all genes present in a sample. One of her aims is to contribute to the fundamental ecological knowledge that can be used to develop microbial-based biotechnological tools that can convert industrial emissions into valuable chemicals.