21 September 2015

Kristine Bohmann receives prize for excellent PhD project

prize

On September 18, Kristine Bohmann received a prize for an exceptionally excellent PhD project at the annual PhD graduation ceremony at the Faculty of Science. She conducted her PhD thesis entitled “Bats, blood-feeders & biodiversity - Illumina metabarcoding in dietary studies” at the Natural History Museum of Denmark under the supervision of Professor Tom Gilbert. She defended her thesis in March 2015.

Kristine has spent the last three years collecting bat shit and leeches in everything from haunted castles in Britain to deep dense rainforests of Madagascar and analyzing the prey-DNA within them. Her results uncover the feeding habits of bats and demonstrate the use of leeches for monitoring animals.

In addition to solving specific biological questions, Kristine’s contribution also covers development and optimization of both laboratory and data analysis pipelines, all of which are extremely important to the rapidly developing field of environmental DNA and molecular biodiversity assessment.
 
Kristine’s PhD defense committee said:

“The research performed by Kristine Bohmann is highly innovative, and at the forefront of the current knowledge in molecular ecology. The thesis is very well written and the objectives are clearly expressed, showing that Kristine Bohmann has a special talent for science communication”.
 
Kristine’s PhD thesis includes six publications including a publication entitled “Environmental DNA for wildlife biology and biodiversity monitoring”, which was the second most downloaded article from the prestigious journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2014.
 
Kristine continues her shining scientific career as a postdoc with Tom Gilbert in the section for EvoGenomics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.