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Johanna Rapp - Postdoc
"As a Postdoc in the LinkLab, I take care of our two mass spectrometers – a high resolution Quadrupole-TOF and a Triple Quadrupole. If you are interested to measure the metabolome of your organisms, please contact me.
Before, I started my PostDoc, I studied Technical Biology at the University of Stuttgart. After that, I obtained my PhD in Microbiology at the University of Tuebingen."
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Marcelo Navarro-Diaz - Postdoc
''I am Marcelo, I joined the group as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022. I hold a bachelor’s in Biology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where I also did my PhD. in Microbial Ecology. I study the ecological interactions in the human nasal microbiome using a synthetic community and a combination of genomics and metabolomics approaches.''
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Andreas Verhülsdonk - PhD Student
''Moin, I am Andreas, a PhD student interested in the cellular influence of targeted knock-downs in E. coli and S. aureus. I work with libraries I design and curate posessing activateable CRISPRi mechanisms, which I subsequently analyse for their metabolic changes in mass spectrometry. Recently, I additionally started working on induceable cell lysis by CRISPRi activation. Before I started my PhD 2022 in the LinkLab I studied "Applied Biology" near Bonn and "Cellular and Molecular Biology" in Marburg.''
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Sevvalli Thavapalan - PhD Student
''Hi, I am Sevvalli, the computational person of the LinkLab. After discovering my love for coding during my studies in biochemistry, I pursued a masters degree in bioinformatics. My main interest is to study the impact of metabolic mutations on the emergence of antibiotic resistances in E. coli and S. aureus. For that I am currently working with genomes of several thousand clinical isolates. Besides that I help out my colleges with computational tasks.''
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Fabian Smollich - PhD Student
''Hi, I am Fabi and joined the Link lab as a PhD student in 2023. I am interested in the connection between the antibiotic resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and its metabolome. Infections with P. aeruginosa are difficult to treat and associated with high morbidity and mortality, which is why the World Health Organization WHO includes P. aeruginosa in its list of ESKAPE pathogens, for which new drugs and treatment options are urgently needed. Due to its large genome, P. aeruginosa has an incredibly versatile metabolism. In this project, we aim to characterize metabolic influence on the antibiotic resistance of clinical P. aeruginosa isolates to identify resistance and tolerance mechanisms and contribute to the global expense to fight P. aeruginosa-infections.''
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Anna Lisa Niemann - PhD Student
Hi, I'm Anna Lisa. I joined the Link Lab as a PhD student in 2023, after studying biology in Münster. Given the urgent need to decarbonize our industries in light of climate change, I am interested in finding new ways to engineer bacterial metabolism for a sustainable bioeconomy. My main goal is to understand and improve the synthetic growth of E. coli on C1 feedstocks, such as CO₂ and formate, to produce valuable compounds, like amino acids, from CO₂.
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Amelie Stadelmann - PhD Student
''Under construction''
Han Li - PhD Student
''I am Han Li, a PhD student who joined the LinkLab in 2024. With a background in environmental microbiology, I am interested in CO₂ reduction and its use in sustainable bioproduction. My current work focuses on engineering E. coli through synthetic biology and metabolic engineering to utilize CO₂-derived compounds, such as ethanol, as alternative feedstocks for biosynthesis''
Nidhi Kulkarni - PhD Student
Hi, I am Nidhi and I joined the Link Lab in October 2025 after studying Master biology in Düsseldorf. My PhD project focuses on establishing temperature-sensitive (TS) mutants as a robust bio-switch in bacteria for enabling dynamic control in industrial biotechnology applications. The goal is to implement these TS mutants to decouple cellular growth from arginine production. Furthermore, the project aims to optimize these production phases by using ethanol as the sustainable carbon source.