Maria Dzunkova

Mária Džunková is an expert in environmental microbiology, mainly employing metagenomics and single cell genomics to discover new microbial lineages and interactions. She started her career at the Czech Academy of Sciences during her undergraduate studies (2005-2010), later obtained her PhD at the University of Valencia (2010-2016), which included a research stay at Harvard (2014). During her postdoc at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics (2016-2019) she developed the "single-cell viral tagging" method to investigate phage-bacteria interactions in the human gut microbiome. At the DOE Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California (2016-2021), she developed techniques to discover symbiotic microbes in marine animals that produce bioactive molecules. Since December 2021, she leads the research group Microbial Single-Cell Genomics at I2SysBio and is a lecturer at the University of Valencia.