Matti Gralka

Thanks to recent advances in sequencing technologies, we have a good understanding of the composition of microbial communities from all corners of the world, including animal guts, oceans, or soils. However, we often do not know what individual community members do, how they interact with each other, and how these interactions drive the community dynamics and function, which limits our ability to predict and alter those dynamics. I tackle this problem by combining lab experiments with ecological theory to uncover principles of how microbes work together to drive biogeochemical cycles.

I am assistant professor in the Systems Biology group at the A-LIFE department at VU Amsterdam. Before moving the Amsterdam, I was a Simons postdoctoral fellow in Marine Microbial Ecology in Otto Cordero's lab at MIT where I studied the physiology,  interactions, and communities of microbes mediating the degradation of biopolymers like chitin in the ocean. I did my PhD in Physics at the University of California Berkeley with Oskar Hallatschek, where I worked on trying to understand how spatial structure affects evolutionary dynamics.

Click the links to learn more about my current and past research, full CV, and publications (see also my Google Scholar profile). 

To get in touch, simply email me at m.gralka@vu.nl.