My research seeks to uncover the fundamental rules that govern how microbial communities organise, interact, and function. Microorganisms rarely operate as isolated individuals; instead they form complex, metabolically interconnected ecosystems in which different organisms cooperate and compete to transform carbon and other elements. My group investigates how these interactions shape the structure, function, and evolution of environmental microbial communities.

We study these questions primarily in extreme natural environments, including hot springs and the deep subsurface. These systems provide powerful natural laboratories for understanding the constraints that shape microbial life, because they are characterised by strong physicochemical limits such as high temperature, energy limitation, or restricted nutrient availability. By studying microbial communities at these environmental limits, we aim to reveal the principles that govern how microbiomes assemble, persist, and function.

A central focus of our work is microbial carbon transformation. Microbial communities are responsible for both the construction of organic molecules from inorganic carbon sources (such as CO₂ and CO) and the degradation of complex organic matter. We investigate how these processes are distributed across microbial communities and how metabolic interactions enable ecosystems to perform transformations that no single organism could achieve alone.

Understanding these processes has important implications for environmental sustainability and biotechnology. For example, we study how microbial activity influences the fate of carbon in the deep subsurface and how microbial processes may affect the stability of geological carbon storage. More broadly, our goal is to use insights from natural microbial ecosystems to guide the development of nature-inspired biotechnologies that harness microbial communities to address global environmental challenges.

Our research combines environmental microbiology, multi-omics (underpinned by metagenomics), cultivation and experimental approaches to study microbial ecosystems across scales – from genes and metabolic pathways to whole community dynamics.