Dr. Gloria Fackelmann

I am a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow and EMBO postdoctoral fellowship awardee investigating the evolution of the human microbiome in the era of plastics at the Segata Lab of Computational Metagenomics, University of Trento, Italy. My expertise lies in microbiome research and microbial ecology with a strong focus on computational metagenomics and statistical ecology. Other projects I’m involved in include studying gut metagenomes in relation to diet and cardiovascular health; food-to-gut microbial transmission; and the diversity of gut metagenomes in Westernized populations.

I completed my fast-track PhD with summa cum laude at Ulm University in Germany, where I was also the recipient of a doctoral scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). My research focused on the impacts of anthropogenic stressors, such as microplastics and anthropogenic habitat change, on the gut microbiome of wildlife. During this time, I gained experience combining genomics, ecology, and bioinformatics (statistical modelling in R e.g. generalized linear mixed models, ordination analyses, dealing with non-normally distributed, compositional data with high zero inflation).