Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Kornelia Smalla
Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Kornelia Smalla was the head of the microbial ecology group in the Institute for Epidemiology and Pathogen Diagnostics at the Julius Kühn-Institut (JKI), Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants, in Braunschweig. She studied chemistry and did her PhD in biochemistry at the Martin-Luther-University in Halle. The venia legendi for microbiology was obtained at the Technical University Braunschweig where she is a Professor for Microbiology. From the beginning of the 1990’s Kornelia Smalla contributed to the new field of molecular microbial ecology. The development of cultivation-independent methods to study soil and plant-associated microbial communities and their response to agricultural management or pollutants such as antibiotics are major themes of her work. Her long-term research interests are unraveling the factors that shape the transferable resistome and plasmid-mediated bacterial adaptation to changing environments.