Deirdre Gleeson

I am a microbial ecologist based in the UWA School of Agriculture and Environment. My research spans both natural and managed ecosystems across terrestrial and aquatic environments. I am particularly interested in how we can better manage the soil microbiome of agricultural ecosystems for increased productivity. My research contributions focus on how the diversity and function of microorganisms are impacted by their surrounding habitat at both micro scale and at landscape scale (e.g. management practices and climate) with particular emphasis on the use of next generation sequencing tools. My research is primarily funded through the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, the Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation, the Australian Research Council and industry partners. I also co-lead the Avon River Critical Zone Observatory (AR-CZO), the first CZO in the southern hemisphere, where we focus on ancient soils in a semiarid landscape. My capabilities are strongly multidisciplinary and include cutting edge technologies for profiling the soil microbiome including DNA and RNA amplicon sequencing, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and quantitative PCR for both carbon and nitrogen cycling processes. I also have well developed multivariate statistical skills for the analysis of large DNA sequencing datasets.