Dr. Katja Lehmann

I combine research into human induced changes to river ecosystems with an interest in the development of citizen science methodology. I am a microbial ecologist within the Freshwater Ecology Group at the CEH with over five years’ experience in riverine microbiological process research, focusing on microbial response to and interactions with pollution. I am interested in researching the biogeography of microbial river communities and how this interacts with sewage effluent pollution. I work particularly on understanding the effect of antiviral medication in sewage effluent and on drivers of antibiotic resistance, their implications to the riverine ecosystems and human health. As a core team member of the Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology Ocean Sampling Day (Micro B3 OSD), a European-funded mega-sequencing campaign, I have lead River Sampling Day (RSD), a bi-annual world-wide sampling event involving the collection of riverine microbial communities by scientists and citizen scientists. Before joining the Freshwater Ecology group, I was a member of NBAF Wallingford, a node of the NERC Biomolecular Analysis Facility, where I applied my bioinformatics expertise to the analysis of NextGen metagenomic sequencing data in server and cloud computing environments.