Velma Aho

We are surrounded by a microbial world: bacteria, archaea, as well as microscopic fungi and protozoa inhabit our bodies, our homes, and every environment that we spend time in. We notice them most of all when they cause trouble, for example as pathogens, but the majority of them are harmless, and many of them even beneficial, for example in biotechnological processes or the human gastrointestinal tract. Modern molecular biology has provided us with the tools to study microbial communities in great detail, and one of the key challenges the field currently faces is how to interpret these large amounts of data in biologically meaningful ways.

I’ve always been interested in the microbial world, and I began to learn about the computational tools used in microbial community research in my master’s studies. In my doctoral thesis (2019, University of Helsinki), I studied the connections of human gut, oral and nasal bacteria and Parkinson’s disease. Between 2020 and 2022, I continued my research on the topic at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, University of Luxembourg, where I expanded my expertise from DNA-centric methods to other approaches, such as mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. From 2023 onwards, I have been working in Norway at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), with the fascinatingly complex microbial community of the cow rumen as my main research topic.

Twitter: @velma_te_a