Joana Falcao Salles

Joana Falcao Salles is a full professor in Microbial Community Ecology at the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life sciences (GELIFES) at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She got her Ph.D. at Leiden University (2005) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Universite Lyon 1, France (2005-2008) before joining the University of Groningen. She is also a member of the executive board of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) since 2020.

Her research line uses ecological and evolutionary theory to unravel the causes and the consequences of free-living and host-associated microbial communities. Central questions are: How are microbiomes formed? What are the processes and mechanisms leading to the development of microbial communities? What are the consequences of microbial diversity on the functioning of the environment/host? She addresses these topics in a range of habitats (agricultural soil, salt marshes soils) and hosts (plants, arthropods, birds, mice, and humans) by combining experimental procedures (field, microcosm, mesocosm, manipulative experiments), modeling, microbiological and molecular techniques, metagenomic and bioinformatic approaches, to address both fundamental and applied questions (agriculture, bio-based economy). Her group currently comprises two postdocs,14 Ph.D. students, and several master’s and bachelor’s students.