Wastewater Microbiomes for Next-Gen Public Health Monitoring
Duration of contract: 4 years
Planned starting date: ASAP
Place of work: University of Vienna
Main supervisor: David Berry (CV | Lab Homepage)
Supervision team: Andreas Bergthaler, Michael Wagner
This position has been filled.
Project description:
The PhD candidate will be responsible for optimizing sample analytics for detection of diverse microbes (including bacteria, archaea, fungi, and mikroeukaryotes) as well as viruses from wastewater samples. Sequencing-based approaches that will be employed include amplicon (16S and 18S rRNA, as well as fungal ITS gene) analyses as well as long-read shotgun metagenomics (e.g., Oxford Nanopore) and proximity-ligation-sequencing.
The PhD candidate will also be involved in acquisition and integration of complementary data (e.g., chemical composition of wastewater, environmental, and public health data) and field application of optimized approaches to seasonal, temporal, and regional variability in wastewater microbiomes.
Additionally, the PhD candidate will perform genomic and comparative genomic analyses to explore novel microbial diversity as well as to characterize the prevalence and diversity of clinically relevant microbes.