Dr. Matti Gralka

Biography

Matti Gralka is an Assistant Professor in Systems Biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He focuses on understanding how individual community members in microbial communities interact, as these interactions drive community dynamics and function. This understanding is crucial for predicting and altering these dynamics in environmental contexts. Gralka combines laboratory experiments with ecological theory to uncover the principles governing microbial cooperation in biogeochemical cycles. His academic journey includes a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, where he studied marine microbial ecology and the physiology of microbial interactions mediating the degradation of biopolymers like chitin in ocean environments. He earned his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he investigated how spatial structure affects evolutionary dynamics.

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