Research
Cancer community ecology
The cells within a tumour are not all equal. Their mutational history determines their genotype. Phenotypic plasticity and stochasticity maps the genotype to the phenotype. Both genotype and phenotype usually show large heterogeneity, which is affected by treatment, cell-cell interactions and immune response. I investigate how understanding a tumour as a population of diverse subpopulations changes the picture and generates new treatment perspectives.
Biodiversity maintenance
Biotic interactions between species or genotypes can increase diversity compared to an expectation based only on abiotic factors. Besides pairwise interactions, such as between predator and prey, I investigate how higher-order interactions can shape biodiversity. Here, essential resources play an important role and determine the food quality of prey species, which often affect coexistence of prey and persistence of predators. Particularly, I showed that prey coexistence is strongly affected if a coexistence-mediating predator relies on essential resources that are unequally distributed among prey species,
Environmental variability
How do organisms, populations and communities cope with environmental variability? Can they withstand the projected increase in frequency of extreme events? And how does simultaneous variability in multiple factors and stressors play out? Those are the questions that motivate investigating the response of diverse model organisms to temperature, food and further abiotic drivers. Using Dynamic Energy Budget models, I investigate this aspect on an individual level which then allows to scale up to communities.
Microbial motility
Microbial motility has important implications for medical applications, forming and leaving a biofilm is one motivating example here. Using microscopic tracking diverse motility patterns become apparent, that are affected by the space the microbes move in. I am interested in the translation of individual motility to population behaviour of prey search and predator avoidance.