Katrin Hammerschmidt

Katrin Hammerschmidt is a group leader at the Institute of Microbiology at Kiel University in Germany. Before, she held positions as postdoctoral fellow at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study in Auckland, at the University of Sheffield, UK, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany. Katrin is an evolutionary biologist and interested in the origin of the hierarchical structure of life. Exemplary, she investigates the evolutionary transition to multicellularity and the evolution of symbiosis. In her work, she combines the approach of experimental evolution with phenotypic and genomic analyses. Through the integration of evolutionary principles in microbiology she recently started projects in translational evolutionary research and science education. She values interdisciplinary collaborations, in particular with a diverse range of biologists, bioinformaticians, science educators, theoreticians and philosophers of biology.