Kristin Aleklett Kadish
PI
Email:
kristin.aleklett_kadish(at)biol.lu.se
ORCID:
0000-0003-0593-9271
A Bit About Me
I grew up in a small town in Sweden, and already as a kid, I was captured by nature and desperately wanted to know more about how it functioned. I watched endless nature shows, made my own floral collections, and set up population studies of snails in the backyard. As I lived next to the forest, fungi were always present, and I was fascinated by how little was known about them compared to other organisms in our surroundings.
Work Experience
2023 -
2020 - 2022
2015 - 2019
2011 - 2015
2004 - 2010
In 2022 I was lucky to be awarded an establishment grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and I am currently establishing my own research group back at Lund University to continue my research on fungal behaviour.
In 2019 I had twins and was away on parental leave until 2020 when I started as a postdoc in the Integrated Plant Protection group with Dr Åsa Lankinen at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Alnarp. In that project we examined the root microbiome of Solanum dulcamara, a relative to potato and how it is affected by different growth environments and transplantations.
In 2015 I moved back to Sweden and started a postdoc in the Microbial Ecology group at Lund University with Dr Edith Hammer. We worked on developing artificial soil systems (Soil Chips) using microfluidics for studying soil ecology (read more about the Soil Chip project here). In my research I then applied these systems to study fungal foraging (you can read more about it in our publication).
In 2011 I moved to Canada, where I did my PhD in the lab of Dr Miranda Hart at UBC-O in Kelowna, BC. The primary research interest of my PhD was to find out how different events in a plant’s life affect the assembly of its microbial communities. Does what happens to a seedling affect the microbiota it will cooperate with as a grown up plant? Do some individuals possess a more beneficial microbiota than others and can it be passed on between generations? (You can read more about my PhD experiments here).
I started my academic career at Lund University, Sweden in the field of Human ecology which led me into doing a BSc in Biology. Since then, my focus of study has been ecology, with a very wide span of courses ranging from marine mammals and paleontology to behavioral ecology, systematics of bryophytes and plant ecology.
Through my bachelor and master thesis I worked together with Professor Håkan Wallander in the fascinating field of microbial ecology. We investigated how different nitrogen content of organic material affects arbuscular mycorrhizal colonization in a sand dune system.