Postdoc Position in Microbial Ecology - Community Assembly and Interactions in Digester Microbiomes

Postdoc Position in Microbial Ecology - Community Assembly and Interactions in Digester Microbiomes

EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne

Lausanne, Switzerland

Mission

The Microbial Physiology and Resource Biorecovery Laboratory (MICROBE), led by Dr. Wenyu Gu at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), invites applications for a fully funded Postdoctoral Researcher position in Microbial Ecology.

We are seeking a highly motivated and talented postdoctoral researcher to join our team at the Institute of Environmental Engineering. The successful candidate will conduct cutting-edge research in applied and environmental microbiology, with a particular focus on microbial community assembly and interaction principles using anaerobic digestion communities as a model system.

Main duties and responsibilities

Anaerobic digestion communities are among the best-characterized and most ecologically important microbial ecosystems. Composed of diverse bacteria and archaea that cooperate through metabolic interactions, these communities drive the degradation of organic matter in oxygen-free environments and ultimately produce methane. They play a central role in global carbon cycling and provide an excellent model for investigating fundamental questions in microbial ecology, including community assembly, species interactions, resilience, and ecosystem functioning.

Using enrichment cultures combined with metabolite profiling and multi-omics analyses, our group has recently revealed that: (1) environmental selection imposed by pH and substrate availability constrains metabolic network architecture despite substantial taxonomic turnover in anaerobic digestion communities, providing a mechanistic explanation for convergent ecosystem functions across similar environments; and (2) amino acid fermentation requires the balancing of oxidative and reductive half-reactions, with Stickland metabolism partitioned among community members rather than encoded and expressed within individual genomes. These findings demonstrate that redox balancing during amino acid fermentation is an emergent property of the microbial community, maintained through metabolite cross-feeding. (Both studies are currently under review.)

Building on these findings, the successful candidate will investigate how microbial interactions shape ecosystem functions and how interaction principles scale in complex communities. The project combines experimental and computational approaches, including high-throughput sequencing, bioinformatics, microbial isolation and cultivation, physiological characterization, and community-level activity and function analyses.

This position is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and EPFL. The postdoctoral researcher will collaborate closely with PhD students and fellow postdoctoral researchers within the laboratory and across EPFL’s international research network.

Profile

• PhD degree in environmental engineering, microbiology, chemical engineering, or a related discipline.
• Strong publication record and demonstrated research accomplishments, including peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations.
• Experience in bioinformatics and modeling is valuable.
• Strong communication and scientific writing skills in English.
• Ability to work effectively in a collaborative and international research environment.