Edith Hammer

I'm a microbial ecologist with a special love for soils and their inhabitants. I am especially interested in microbial-microhabitat interactions, both how their direct surrounding impacts what microbes do, and how microbes shape their surroundings. To better understand this we developed microfluidic model systems which we call soil chips, or "windows to the underground". Those chips allow us to spy on the otherwise hidden world of soils, both its organisms and its biochemistry, to "think like microbes", and to raise knowledge and understanding for an important ecosystem in need of protection.