Dr. Stefanie Schulz

Stefanie Schulz holds a diploma in Biology and a PhD in Natural Sciences.

She started her scientific carrier 2011 as PostDoc at the Technical University Munich at the Chair of Soil Ecology. Since 2012 she is working at Helmholtz Munich. Starting as a PostDoc, she became the Head of the Working Group “Soil Microbiomes” at the Research Unit Comparative Microbiome Analysis in 2015 (now: Environmental Microbiomes). Currently Stefanie is doing her habilitation at the TU München and works as lecturer since 2020. Now, she heads the working group “Environmental Microbiomes” and is the deputy of the Research Unit Comparative Microbiome Analysis.

Microbial communities in the environment are key drivers for Ecosystem Services provided by nature and thereby support human health and wellbeing. However climate- and global change has impacted environmental microbiomes in the last decades, resulting in significant losses of diversity and the associated functions as well as the invasion of new species, which might act as pathogens for humans, animals and plants. Therefore environmental- and human health are closely interconnected as summarized also the in the Planetary Health Concept. We want to develop strategies to stabilize microbial diversity in nature and define strategies for the sustainable use of resources in the face of climate and global change and thereby prevent the development of environmental diseases including allergies and infections.

To tackle the different research topics Stefanie’s group combines high end molecular techniques like next generation sequencing with targeted isolation approaches, stable isotope probing and basic characterization methods like quantitative PCR approaches, potential activity measurements and quantification of nutrient pools.